Today, a shorter piece, brought from the backlogs, on Sergio Leone’s seminal work. For those who need a recap: Three gunslingers, none of whom could exactly be called “good”, vie with each other and very tenuously work together in pursuit of a bullion of Confederate gold, hidden in a cemetery ahead of the approaching army. In the best of Western traditions, it exists in a world that’s more allegory than historical, as the plateaus of Spain stand in for the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and World War II plays the part of the War Between the States. Darkly humorous, intense, and loaded with character work which is subtle and spectacular imagery which is not, it’s a film that’s earned its reputation. In short, it is the archetypal Spaghetti Western, or at least the one whose soundtrack everyone rips off for parodies.
Continue reading “Thoughts on: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966)”Now that I’ve met you I see your face everywhere: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Part two of the two-parter today on classic American science fiction films! And clearly the more substantial of the two, for obvious reasons, Plan 9 and The Day may both be a classics in their own right, both renowned for their quality, but only one of them left an indelible mark upon the pop literary culture in its wake, and spoilers, it wasn’t the one with amateur-theater zombies.
This review has been my nemesis for the past month, I just haven’t had the time to sit down and give it the attention it deserved for weeks, but I finally managed to squeeze it in there. So without further ado…
Continue reading “Now that I’ve met you I see your face everywhere: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)”Plan 9 From Outer Space
It’s everybody’s favorite best worst science fiction horror thriller! Part of a two-parter today! Stay tuned for more!
Continue reading “Plan 9 From Outer Space”Comparing “Yojimbo” and “A Fistful of Dollars”
Hello again, with another movie review. This is an older one, dated April 2021 on my machine. Been watching a lot of movies these past few years, for anyone who’s not a future archaeologist trying to piece together our culture, “March 2020” will tell you all you need to know why. I hope to post more entries from that backlog in the future, but that means sorting through them, figuring out which ones are worth sharing with the world. This one was a shoe-in though, a look comparing the movie that put both Eastwood and Leone on the map, to the giant whose shoulders they were standing upon.
As ever, beware there be spoilers, and enjoy!
Continue reading “Comparing “Yojimbo” and “A Fistful of Dollars””Working Stiffs
Hello again. I’ve got some more reviews in-process but they need a bit of work I feel, and the writing piece I posted last week seemed to go over well, so I thought I’d post two more which I felt would go well together, horror stories about blue-collar Joes. The second is a bit of a rush job, definitely a first draft, but I hope you enjoy.
Also, I feel the need to tell everyone that the blog site asked me “What are your feelings about eating meat?” when I opened up this post to write it. That feels a bit ominous, Mr. Website, come on Halloween was over a month ago, even if yes I know I’m posting these a bit out of season myself.
Continue reading “Working Stiffs”The Overdressed Drifter
As part of Thanksgiving celebrations at a friend’s house, I saw a movie. It was, uh… really awful, but there were a few bits that I thought would work pretty well in a better script. The next day, I was challenged to make good on that assertion, so I whipped up this little scene in a bit over an hour. Although inspired by the film, it’s really meant as a prose piece. I might post more writings like this here in the future.
“I’m totally overdressed, aren’t I?” Cassie Birch looked down at her dress, a big orange-pink puffy thing covered in frilly lace, the tips of the giant bow jutting from her back like fairy’s wings just visible in the corners of her vision. Compared to the frayed smocks and tattered third-generation suits being flung across the dance floor, she fit in about as well as a piglet in a flotilla of goslings.
In retrospect, the price on the dress had been higher than anything else in the shop by a fair margin, and when she had pointed it out the store manager’s face had lit up like he’d just shared a case of whiskey with the horse and practically jumped for joy, but a price was just money and there was always more where it came from, and the only looks Cassie ever saw on a shopkeep’s face normally was cowering fear or blank-eyed surprise, so she wasn’t exactly up on the social cues.
All she had wanted was just to look pretty. After ten years on the trail, covered in dust and grime and never even so much as changing her leathers unless they found something in her size with not too many bullet holes in it, didn’t she deserve it? Williams didn’t think so. He was always being practical, that one.
“Oh no-no-no-no-no-no-no, you look lovely!” Cassie’s date looked down to his own ensemble, a pair of sun-blanched coveralls, stained here and there with grass and sheep shit. “Though I think I might be underdressed. Look, how’s about I go back to the ranch house and get a change of clothes, I don’t think my daddy would mind if I stole his suit, just for a bit, and you can stay here so you don’t, y’know, miss the party-”
“No! Don’t go!” Cassie said, with more urgency than she had intended. She set her gaze across the dance floor again. It was funny, what did she have to be afraid of? Her eye, trained by years of practice, could pick out which of the burly bearded men swinging instruments and dance partners around were truly rough-and-tumble, not pretender yokels trying to act tough. She could kill them all in six seconds flat, if she had her guns, and the rest would fall in line after that, given the proper motivation. And she did have her guns, the feel of the cold steel pressing up against her thighs a habit she wasn’t quite ready to give up yet, even if she wasn’t sure how she would get at them through the bustle of the dress. That had been part of the appeal of it, too, now that she thought of it. So impractical.
From a practical standpoint, she had nothing to be afraid of. Nevertheless, every instinct in her was telling her to turn around and run. She didn’t belong here, amongst the lights and the glamour and all these people enjoying themselves, with musical instruments and bread chunks with cream, spun up just this afternoon for the occasion. She belonged back in the mountains looking down on them, in the company of men whose light was the fire pit, but only when there wasn’t a posse, and whose music was the drunken ballad of the Man from Nantucket, or sometimes Bawaldy if they were feeling creative, and who, when the bacon ran out, ate the spare shoes.
Not that she really felt like she belonged among those men anymore, either. It was probably why she was attracted to Marcus, from the moment she had laid eyes on him, he had seemed as out of sorts in this little one-street town as she had felt. He was no less a drifter than she were, even if his drifts never took him farther than the depot where he sold the wool, or the ridge where the sheep were always getting themselves into trouble.
“Hey uh… Cassie? You kind of blanked there for a minute. Say, this isn’t really my kind of scene, so maybe we should just, both turn around and go find our own fun?”
“Oh yes, please. I would love to.”
“I mean Bessie’s found some really nice views up in the hills and it would be real nice spending the evening with a girl who’s not a sheep, I mean- oh geez, did I just say that? That’s not what I meant at all. I mean, you’re not a sheep. It’s just, you know how lonely it gets… no I didn’t mean that either! I just talk with Bessie! Not that I’d do anything untoward with you either! So I guess it is just like Bessie… Not that this implies there isn’t a difference between you and a sheep! Oh geez… I’ve messed everything up…”
Cassie laughed. They said he was the worst sheep farmer this side of the Rockies, but to her he was the nicest man she’d ever known. It was such a shame the town was going to be burned to the ground, for what they did to Williams’ brother. She really should tell Marcus who she really was, give him enough time to run. He did say he’d always wanted to go to San Francisco anyway. But she could tell him in the morning, just one more night first, pretending to be normal.
Dancing on Broomsticks: “I Married A Witch” and “Bell, Book, and Candle”
To continue this little informal Halloween run (it is still counts as Halloween season, right? I mean, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet!), I was thinking I would share my thoughts on 1942’s “I Married A Witch” and it’s informal sort-of remake in 1958’s “Bell, Book, and Candle”. This will be a bit lighter weight than yesterday’s pieces, though in a way that fits the films. As usual, these were my thoughts immediately after having seen the films, lightly edited, and spoilers beware.
I Married A Witch (1942)
What a farce. I probably should have expected it coming in, but selling “pop-maize” at the witch burning really sets the mood. Well mostly. It suggests a black comedy, whereas the actual tone is far sillier. There’s hardly an ounce of angst in the whole thing. Despite casting a curse upon the bloodline for it, the witches hardly seem to mind being dead. It’s even lighter weight than Bringing Up Baby. Oh it’s got a bit of light satire (“why couldn’t you have waited until after you got into office to turn crook, like everybody else”; I like the implication from the opening of the film that the town would not have cares if the witches had practiced just *outside* the city limits) and there’s just enough character drama to make a plot, but for the most part it’s pure dreamy fluff.
I wonder if the date of production, 1942, had any bearing on the tone? WWII had been raging for a while, America had just joined it, the director was French, his first film in America. Maybe the lightness was a response to that, artist and audience alike most interested in pure feel-good escapism? Looking it up just a bit, it seems the director, René Clair, was known for his dreamlike, non-representational works, and had been bouncing around the London film scene well before the war began. It was a film well within his wheelhouse. I still wonder though…
Seduction by persistence. She’s such a troll, much less innocent than Bringing up Baby, though she’s so ditzy it’s hard to say where the act begins or not. Nothing she ever said was *untrue*. Still, it’s difficult to tell when she actually snared him, her time warp spell seemed to but then he reverted, and he shows concern for her but that’s not necessarily romantic (whatever the fiancé thought). It really felt like he didn’t fall for her entirely until after she had crashed his wedding and framed him for murder and forced the elopement, a sort of “well might as well” sort of thing. Though to be fair, the alternative was clearly a mistake waiting to happen.
I liked the joke about the husband joining the Civil War to get away from his wife, and the bitter old married couple in the car… who were “just married”.
The father, who I guess is literally Satan, is quite the bastard. Oh he’s goofy, all petty curses and cackling with glee (“the house! All lit up like fire?!” “Not yet it isn’t!”), but man, when your daughter accidentally downs a love potion, maybe don’t try to get her sudden paramour killed and threaten to lock her in a tree until the end of mankind. Maybe get her an antidote? It wasn’t even his curse she was breaking, it was hers. I guess the idea is that witches and warlocks are agents of chaos and suffering, and they care not whence the tears flow, only that it does.
If that is the mythology of witches in the movie then I guess I get why they would be mistrusted. Watching the movie I really didn’t get why the girl was so worried about being outed as a witch (…or for that matter why the father was even, with the powers they displayed no paltry pack of Puritans should have held them, and even being burned alive was mostly an inconvenience), or why the newlywed husband was so uncomfortable when he realized the truth of it. I mean ok sure realizing your ditzy capricious wife has godlike powers she can use at a whim might be a bit worrying, but c’mon, she’s just a few tails short of a fox spirit, and everyone loves foxy ladies. Same with the witch’s obsession with becoming a good little housewife who has to set her fires by hand, it makes sense as a character bit, but I didn’t get the sense that the film meant any irony by it, it was playing it dead serious. Real serious taboo against magic I guess.
I was really hoping she was going to stop up the bottle at the end with telekinesis, after all, father did declare “you’re a true witch again!” a few seconds earlier.
You’re just waiting for the father to get stopped up from the first time he hits the bottle. It’s the classic beelzebub blue bottle trick.
Even at just over an hour (77 minutes), the film drags a little bit. Though I do appreciate that neither the wedding nor the election were the climax, like you might expect. It works well enough that the break from formula is refreshing.
Similarly, the “I love you” song running gag at the wedding. Rule of three? Round these parts we do rule of six!
Fat black kitty sort of vanished between cuts. She was stroking him all Blofeld, then turns around in her chair and the cat’s just gone.
The special effects work was probably pretty impressive for the time, with wandering brooms and flying cars and whatnot.
It’s a charming little thing.
Bell, Book and Candle (1958)
It’s a Christmas movie!
…And it’s a slog. It’s only 26 minutes longer than I Married a Witch but it feels interminable.
There’s no sense of magic or weirdness or threat.
The premise is pretty good. Witches live among us. They cannot feel emotions, they cannot blush or cry or truly love, they live isolated lives that only close in over time as their magic overtakes them. The source of their power is their familiars, animal spirits to whom they are both master and slave. One of these hedonist spell-weavers takes a fancy to a boy toy, manipulates him horribly, and when he starts to break free, she realizes he wasn’t the only one falling under the spell of love.
It’s a premise that has some serious challenges it has to resolve: How does one write a sympathetic sociopath (or whatever the proper word is) as the protagonist of your romance? How does a secret society of shut-ins form a community? How do we make a film with multiple multiple animal characters and extras, using 1958 special effects? If love is out, hot blood (lust) is in, what’s the difference, what is love, really?
Unfortunately, the film doesn’t have a good answer for any of these. So while characters will exposit bits that suggests or outright states all these, none of it feels real. The witches are no differently characterized than the other characters, their otherness is only skin-deep, if even that. Gin claims that witch-power is addictive and ultimately destructive, but we see nothing of that, all the witches are perfectly normal socialites, no hags who went too far in sight. There are only two animals in the film, for four witches, not including extras, and none of them really speak to the personalities of their masters, the main man cat itself is more a very cute prop than a character. Gin seems to be in love from the opening scene, whatever the films insists otherwise.
There are some good scenes, mostly the key ones: The scene of actual seduction, casting the spell using the cat, makes use of a striking image and cinematography to sell probably the only genuinely spooky moment of the film. The romance in the kitchen seemed believable enough. The would-be-husband rushing out to get a taxi and being drawn back in by the spell is a neat gag. The confrontation after the spell-break, where Gin’s burst of anger precipitates her downfall, and the following scene where her cat runs away, sealing it, and the following mirror-side session with auntie, are genuinely good. “I don’t want to be human!” Those were well-done scenes! Unfortunately the connective tissue between these scenes, that leads one to the next and makes them effective payoff, is half-baked.
No one ever changed. Whether he was about to be married, be-hexed, angry, or back in love, the leading man was always the same semi-humorous stammering mess (with a verbal tick I knew I had heard before, and finally figured out now: Spyro 3, the dinosaur-cowboy level, the cowardly sheriff was aping this guy’s style). Whether the leading witch was bemoaning her boring life and eyeing the hunk(?) upstairs or breathlessly telling him that he has given her the great gift of pain, I could not tell you where it was she “fell in love” with him, if it weren’t for the fact she told us point blank when it happened, throughout she was too emotive to come across as a psycho and not emotive enough to be believably human. It’s telling that three of the best the best five scenes in the movie are the ones where the actress is allowed to emote.
The side characters are superfluous. The writer, a sort of oatmeal Columbo, could be excised from the movie entirely at no effort. The wastrel brother and crazy upstairs auntie are barely more significant, serving as comedy relief and spear carriers in a film that didn’t really need neither. The first fiancé exists as an obstacle but vanishes from the movie after the barest of efforts on the part of our protagonist, not to be seen until a brief scene at the end where she still does nothing. The film missed a bet not making her a witch too.
One of the other major problems of the film is… the witches are too normal. I was not aware that bongos were Satanic. Nor jazz trumpets. African art (or “primitive sculpture” as the film labels it) is a shorthand for spooky and exotic and countercultural to this day, but nothing in the framing suggests that. And yet when the witch becomes human, the sculptures spontaneously turn into a flower-shop. Apparently the mere presence of the statuary was supposed to be unnerving. It’s probably a product of the era it was made in, but it really shows why The Adams Family had to exist. Get over yourselves. If bongos get your heebies in a jeeby, you’re going to have some problems entering the real world. Hippies and Goth are going to rock your socks. And don’t get me started about China.
Were witches supposed to be hidden or not? Gin says they must remain hidden, but never suggests why. What are they worried about? Persecution? Posers? Well, actually, apparently nothing, Gin is the only person who expresses any consternation over the whole thing, her brother is quite cheery to sell the business secrets for cash, De Pass accepts clients for a fee and makes no bones about it, even the doorkeeper was more amiable gimmick than a serious bouncer for the good of the occult world. It reminded me of The Exorcist, a similar uncertainty about what place magic actually held in its fictional world. Though The Exorcist is overall more effective at what it’s trying to do (I’ll probably have a post about that film up sometime).
What were the motivations of its characters? I could not tell you. Why was Gin bored in the beginning? Why did she take to Shep? Why does she reveal she is a witch? And so on and so forth.
Who’s the antagonist? Not the fiancé, she has no power. Theoretically it’s Gin herself, her callous use of power. But that brings us back to the above.
Across the board the film was very tell-not-show, and what it did show never sold it, possibly because it’s already established a bad precedent. Our leading man is scared by an ordinary Victorian door, and then balks in disgust at a bowl of gruel, completely exaggerated.
“I Married A Witch” was far better in most every respect. The characters were broad, but their broadness was consistent, readable, and contributed to the plot. The magic was whimsical, but also often uncanny, and again fed into the plot.
It feels like it’s pulling pieces from “I Married A Witch”, the obsession with normalcy, the loss of powers, the dire need to keep the witches secret. In this film, they’ve already taken on the half-considered, do-it-because-we-always-have feeling of clichés. I think there’s promise for at least some of them to be done well in the premise, but that would mean asking why include them at all, something I don’t think anyone seriously did.
The cat was pretty good at least. Very well-behaved, very catty, what a face. The meows were clearly dubbed, but whose counting. There’s a cute story about the cat. Pyewacket was the cat’s actual name, well one of them, see there were twelve stunt doubles, each trained for exactly one trick, one scene, like the cars in the Blues Brothers. By the end of the filming, Pyewacket had fallen for the leading actress, so I guess the witch got her familiar after all.
The whole book subplot was completely unnecessary. It’s used to get the lover boy into the shop, investigating weird lights. And it’s used to initiate the conflict between the lovers, the brother and the sister have a fight about whether or not to reveal the existence of witches, she doesn’t want to be revealed, which then leads to her revealing herself to him… somehow. Those are important plot points that need incitement, but grafting a whole subplot and two extraneous characters to it is really not an elegant solution.
There’s a line briefly in the middle of the film, the title drop. Close the book, silence the bell, snuff the candle, that’s how you exorcise a witch. I thought for sure that those instructions would be important later but nope.
Mom described the film as “arms length” and “physically repelling”, not in the sense that it was disgusting, but rather in the sense that it was emotionally unavailable, “like a waterproof coat”. “There was nothing to identify with.” “It never let me in.” Which describes it at least as well as I’ve managed to.
Well, Dad seemed to like it at least.
But man, so much wasted promise…
“Mad Dog can outfly a three-headed lizard any day of the week”: In defense of The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
Yesterday’s post was about the 1999’s “The Mummy” reboot, its predecessor, and its sequel. However, that still leaves one movie to review, the much-maligned third entry of the rebooted series, and which laid the franchise to rest once again until it was resurrected once again in 2017. As I said then, we had gotten started on this run of films about plastered necromancers exactly because of that film being unexpectedly enjoyable, but it was unclear if the enjoyment had been novelty, the company, or the movie itself, an answer I promised would be answered today:
Will it hold up like I remember it?
Continue reading ““Mad Dog can outfly a three-headed lizard any day of the week”: In defense of The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor”Bury me alive where the scarab beetles jive: Three Mummy Movies
Though maybe not the three you’re thinking of. Or maybe so. As part of our Halloween celebrations (this posting is a bit later than I intended), the family watched a pretty full run of Mummy movies: the 1932 original and all three of Sommers’ reboot trilogy. We saw them because a few months earlier, we had seen the third reboot film, “Tomb of the Dragon Emperor”, at a friend’s house, our first visitation post-Covid (as much as then or even now can be called that), and found it… surprisingly enjoyable, despite all expectations set by the film’s review scores and its own preshow ad-roll (for the count: it’s own prequel, Coraline, a terribly generic third person shooter, a slob comedy starring a dog and pop music, and an ad for bluray, featuring Hellboy & Hulk), I said at the time “It’s the best Bond film we’ve seen in a while.” Anyway, we had heard that the first two films were very different, and overall better, and this film was pretty compelling, so why not give it a shot? Will these cheese balls withstand the test of time better than the ones at the back of the fridge? Let’s find out!
As always these are my thoughts immediately after having seen the movie, essentially unedited. Spoilers beware. Enjoy!
The Mummy (1999)
The third one was pretty good. I hear the first and second are quite different.
Boy that was stupid. Not quite a dog, just dumb. I’ve seen worse James Bond films. And I think I preferred the third film. Though exactly why I will have to guess at.
Honestly, I don’t really see the difference between them. Both are supremely over the top, with massive nonsensical action set pieces and silly humor. Both have similar strengths and weaknesses. I suppose the biggest difference is the cultural touchstones it’s hitting, this one’s all Moses and Biblical apocalypse rather than Shangri La and Qin Shi Huang.
The opening shots, with the 90’s CGI statuary and crowds, looked straight out of a videogame. Pair it up with some weirdly smooth, shiny, stilted-movement digital puppets rather than live human actors, or maybe yes with live actors but more amateurish costumes and horrendous compression, and it would be a perfect replica. I’m getting nostalgic.
It was so videogamey. Not just in the opening but throughout. They do mirrors-and-sunbeams puzzles. O’Connell’s signature is the Tomb Raider maneuver, arms straight pistols akimbo. Between the swarms of murderous crawling insects and the fat accomplice with a phobia, I think Uncharted 3 was a teensy bit inspired by this film. Heck, there was a lot of proto-Uncharted vibes across the whole film, even if the videogame is far more serious and grounded.
As the city of the dead inevitably crumbled to rubble and the heroes were rushing to get away, I was reminded of a line from Uncharted 3: “Three bullets, Nate. How did you manage to do *this* with three bullets?!”
Watching that opening, I now really want to see a treasure hunt movie set in the year 2522 or so, where the ancient culture being exoticized and exaggerated into ridiculous high fantasy is America. I don’t know what it would look like, I just think it would be hilarious. I don’t know, maybe the secret cabal of bankers who hid their stash from Roosevelt during The Depression, or maybe the lost tomb of Abraham Lincoln. I don’t know, just something almost but not quite accurate to the spirit of the contemporary mythology, and ridiculously ahistorical. Maybe have the bankers keeping themselves alive as mummies through cryogenics or something and make their descendants inbred Innsmouth hillbillies or the like, striking from the cypress swamps like “Aguirre, Wrath of God”. Give the States equal time on the exoticization chicanery. Though maybe Innsmouth hillbillies would be too much? I’m getting sidetracked.
Boy what a bunch of bastards. There’s an unspoken rule in the hero business, when confronted with a mob of hypnotized or non-irreversibly transformed civilians, the hero is supposed to refrain from hurting them, at least anything permanent. But here our heroes were plowing through them in a car. And then there was the treasure hunter who just straight up was shooting them, and the librarian with the scimitar. And this was after the American group of treasure hunters, highly suspecting a booby trap, sent in the labor first. Can’t say I was sorry to see any of them get noshed.
That’s part of what I liked about the third mummy I think, it was nicer, fewer red shirts or innocent bystanders getting picked off.
Another reason was that it seemed to have a more consistent plot, the through-line of the adventurer-meets-witch and the father-son bickering and whatnot. Here the central character arc should be the romance between the leads. It almost does it, Fraser does a competent Han Solo knockoff (Dad said he reminded him of Mal, from Firefly), and the bit on the boat before it was on fire had hints of Romancing the Stone / Crocodile Dundee, but then it sort of gets lost in all the running about and screaming.
The editing was no less sloppy than in the third movie. I don’t remember as much mid-combat exposition, but it makes up for it with a few really baffling cuts.
First up is the dynamite stick Chekhov’s gun, after well establishing it (if by being an idiot, seriously dude, stop swinging the lit stick of dynamite around like it’s a torch, either throw it or put out the fuse!) O’Connell surreptitiously sticks it in his jacket, a subtle act but enough, aha! the astute audience thinks, that will come up in the climax. And it does, three quarters of a movie later he just casually pulls it out and flings it at some pursuing zombies, then a second one a minute later. Ok, why bother establishing it then?
Worse though is the dropped balls in the climax, the film clearly establishes that the golden book requires a key, just like the black one, and then shows us Beni prepping his escape on some camels, and he paws at a suspiciously key-like trinket. But the key somehow isn’t necessary for reading the inscription of charm royal guard (what, was it written on the cover?) and the next time we see Beni he’s back inside the temple for some reason. It’s… bad.
The monster would just develop new powers as the plot demands. Now he can turn into sand for a Dracula riff, now he’s puking up flies, hey look, army of zombies, why not (am I talking about the pustuled populace of Cairo, or the ancient mummy servants? You decide!).
It was weird, it sometimes felt like it wanted to do a horror film, the mummy stalking about offing organ donors one by one, or the race-for-the-treasure subplot between the adventurers, but it also had all these other things it wants to do, and to keep things as loud as possible, so it rushes things and screws the atmosphere.
The royal airstrip seemed surprisingly normal and untouched when literal Armageddon was happening just inside the city limits. The sun wasn’t eclipsed or anything.
It felt like there was more slapstick in this one than in the third film, but it could also be just my memory.
I was sorry that Imhotep and his girl Friday didn’t manage to resurrect themselves. I mean, they did murder the king, but he seemed sort of a prick and it was for love, give them a break. If they really needed a human sacrifice for the resurrection (and he didn’t seem to 3000 years ago), couldn’t they use Beni instead? I don’t think anyone would mind that. Except Beni, obviously. His ultimate death was pretty well done, the dwindling light and the roaches closing in, darkness and screams.
I was also disappointed there was no rain of frogs. All the other biblical plagues but no frogs? Bollocks.
The sword fights against the zombies were pretty good, you could tell they were having a lot of fun with ridiculous moves and the breakaway goons, like skewering one’s head and using it as a club to shatter another. I swear he kicked one of them in the nuts.
Camels have really cute faces when you look at them up close. And really sharp teeth.
The Mummy Returns (2001)
I like this one better than the first, though I still think I prefer the third. This one felt a bit overlong. It didn’t flag, exactly, it’s just hard to maintain focus when everything is blaring at 11 for so long.
I was honestly a bit surprised to see the writer-director was the same as the last one. This one feels the most “Verbinski” of the three, though even I’m not quite sure what I mean by that.
Even though he seemed to be wanting to ape Spielberg, what with the dig site riff and the moon-shot homage.
It was better put together overall I felt. That might be Sommers learning as he goes, or maybe he’s just more comfortable with established relationships than establishing them. There weren’t any obviously bad edits, though there wasn’t anything noticeably clever either.
This one has actual character work. It’s shallow and unsurprising, but it’s nice seeing the leads be lovebirds in this one, after the non-romance of the first. The best bit is definitely the opening sequence where they are bickering about the best procedure for robbing the tomb, and the best bit of that is Evie crossing the scorpion pit all trepidatious and grossed out, while he just stomps and crunches across. Cute.
I couldn’t help but notice they often forgot about their son while they were making googoo eyes at each other. The film didn’t do much with it except let the unsupervised kiddo McGuffin himself with a clingy cursed artifact. But I guess it does make a good retrofit explanation for their relationship in the next one.
I also liked all the reincarnation and destiny stuff. Dopey as heck but I’m a sucker for it and it gave the plot something to chew on between set pieces.
I liked the kid building sand castles to direct his parents. Whirlwind tour of every spectacular site in Egypt I’m guessing.
Oh boy the… stuff. Anubis the Satan analogue called upon for power. The pygmy zombie horde (get out of the hell-grass you mooks! they’ll only ever find the parts they didn’t like). I was wondering if Innsmouth hillbillies was maybe too much. I still wonder, but it has precedence.
The film had an Egyptologist consultant and a military advisor. It would appear they listened to both equally.
Patricia Velazquez does a good job as the villainess. I especially like the delivery of the line about sticking poisonous snakes in the kid’s bed, it’s all sweet and motherly and ironic.
Man what a brat kid. For being total evil bastards the villains were too kind to him. “Remember, we need you alive, not in one piece” is what they *should* have told him.
I was really expecting him to do some home alone shenanigans on the (less pretty, non-protagonist) tomb robbers in the opening sequence. Something to do with that mouse trap he seemed to be building, whatever that was.
I noticed they retconned the first movie. In that one, the pharaoh is depicted as pretty possessive of his trophy-temple-idol-whatever wife. Here, excising one line and making the lead his daughter, he’s a good guy. They also leave out the bit where his successor purged the death temple and “mummified them alive”.
They totally repeated themselves with the outrun the giant head bit, but eh it’s no worse than Bond does.
Other repeats were clearly intended as callbacks, like the kid book-shelving the pillars, or taking after his uncle and not recognizing the bird sign. It was cute.
The hell pit of screaming souls was nice and freaky.
The Scorpion King looked like a Resident Evil villain.
Also this one was less bloodthirsty. Much lower bodycount, at least among the nominally good-guy forces. I think the bird was the only casualty.
The climatic scene, with the dude stabbed and standing over the other guy and the third guy sliding into position to curl his hands and scream no, cheated to the audience, it felt very amateur theatre or something, just very staged and very dramatic. I wouldn’t have minded if more of the movie had had that feeling.
I really don’t know why someone would say the third one is more over the top than this. We’ve got dog-man armies, reincarnation, killer bugs, man-bugs, a literal airship like something out of an Arabian nights gas-lamp fantasy, pygmy zombies, a telekinetic wizard, etc.
After that, we decided to watch the original Universal Studios Mummy movie again, to compare it to the film that was theoretically updating it for modern audiences.
The Mummy (1932)
The original, the progenitor!
The remake is only very loosely so. The mummy being resurrected by a careless reading of the spell of resurrection comes from this. The central premise of an ancient mummy, a sorcerer “mummified alive” for sacrilege and with a dead lover, a priestess and/or daughter of the pharaoh, is the same (and the half-accurate joke when the corpse is first discovered that it was for getting frisky with the ladies). That the daughter was not supposed to be touched by men was in both, and her breaking that vow with the future mummy, though in the remake it seems to be more literal. The modern-day slave of the mummy comes from this one, and all the resurrection and fate stuff that was sloughed off for the sequel, too.
However, for the most part the remake is doing its own thing, very explosively, the points of contact few and far between, and often twisted almost beyond recognition.
In both, the resurrected reposer takes on a native flunky, with implications that being descended from the original mummy’s subjects is key to the relation. In the original, Karloff takes “The Nubian”, a manservant of the heroes’ family. It’s unclear if he serves because he views the ancient priest as a truer master than his British employers or if he is bidden against his will by some sort of ancestral memory, though I think the text leans heavily towards the latter, there’s a line referencing “his blood”, and the call of history and past lives is a prominent theme in the film. In the remake, he takes Beni, a sniveling coward who serves so as to be eaten last, after hearing him “speak the language of the slaves”, whether he is primarily motivated by a need for an interpreter or a sense that the sycophant would know his place is unclear. Personally, I think the earlier movie is a more compelling situation.
The original actually makes it clear why Imhotep needs to sacrifice the girl (well, sort of, I’ll get to that), and why he didn’t need a sacrifice the first time around, before he was interrupted by the palace guards: in the original, the victim was the reincarnation of his lover, so of course he couldn’t get a substitute, or need her before the present day. It’s a plot hole in the remake induced by keeping both too little and too much of the original.
A single scroll becomes a twin pair of gold-plated MacGuffin books.
And then there’s the whole “making Anck su Namun into two people” thing, but I’ll get to that.
. . . .
The original was a much more grounded film.
Imhotep is not a stalking pile of viscera, an obvious monster, but rather hidden in plain sight, a stone-faced foreigner aristocrat who just so happens to be a resurrected sorcerer. And the sorcery is, for want of a better word, more believable, much more grounded in what was still or only very recently not mainstream mysticism than his later incarnation. He doesn’t turn to sand or puke flies or put his face in a tsunami, he causes heart attacks and hypnosis at a distance, only noticeable as the work of a witch by those in the know, entrances with his gaze, and scrapes and scrounges to enable his ultimate ritual. Even when the heroes are standing right in front of him and wish to be rid of him, they cannot, his force of presence is simply too strong. Whether this is an artistic choice or simply the lack of special effects available at the time I’m sure could be a matter of some debate, but it absolutely is a depiction of the wizard that is largely lost to the sands of time in modern media.
That sense of mysticism carries into the rest of the film. While some scoff at the notion of curses and protective magic, even before the mummy arises others take them deadly seriously, and are proven the wiser: “the gods of Egypt still inhabit these hills, and though some of their power fades, others remain potent” says an early character, interestingly echoing the worldview of the old goat prospector of “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”.
The gods are, somewhat surprisingly, not reduced down to vague analogues for God or Satan or mere dispensaries of malevolent monsters and magic memorabilia, but exist as a pantheon (if not necessarily accurate to the Egyptian pantheon entirely), there is nothing in the film to indicate a clear hierarchy between Bast and Osiris and Isis and Anubis, and while Imhotep aligns himself with some and the heroes with others, there’s little sense that the gods inherently are picking sides, instead they are used as tools, each for their own specialties. The climax of the film is Anck su Namun beseeching her patron goddess to forgive her indiscretions and save her from her folly. They are tangible parts of the world, existing beyond the plot.
The dig sites actually resemble dig sites of their time, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, no acid traps or pits of scorpions to endanger the labor lines. There’s actually funerary practices performed onscreen for the dead princess, and a better sense of what daily life was like for the future mummies before the plot kicked off, even if it only lasts for all of ten seconds.
Mummifying a man *alive* doesn’t involve buckets of flesh-eating beetles and a nose-pick lobotomy, it just means wrapping a man up as he struggles and tossing him in a coffin, a fate no less gruesome for being more mundane.
. . . .
It’s also much more focused than the remake. There’s more going on, conceptually, and more sense of threat and involvement from our main characters.
Something I’ve only noticed since writing my last notes on the remake films is how often they get distracted away from their main cast, especially when there’s threat involved. The two best examples are in comparison to the original.
Like in the original, there is a doomed expedition who open the box warning them not to, and die for it. Unlike in the original, this section does not make up a majority of the plot, there’s only two of them for one, one killed offscreen after going mad at the end of the film’s brief prelude, the other’s death is integrated into the plot as a dramatically ironic faux heroic-sacrifice.
And even beyond that, the characters involved are not American caricatures and vague foils to the main cast, but have bearing to the storytelling of the film. One is the father of the protagonist, and so has some obvious cachet in the storytelling.
The other is a bit more subtle, the hotshot young archaeologist more interested in glory than in science (as an aside, when the girl expresses consternation at the idea of unwrapping the dead, an archaeologist exclaims “it’s for science!” in a way only a few inches removed from Frankenstein), with his handsome looks and callow personality, makes an obvious mark for the lead of the film. I can’t imagine it wasn’t intended to be shocking when he’s kicked the bucket barely ten minutes in. There’s also some nice tension will-he-won’t-he as he eyes the cursed box, including a fake out where it looks like no he will resist the temptation after all, but of course he doesn’t.
Anyway, most of the storytelling is kept focused on the burgeoning (if fate-mandated) love affair between Helen and the young Whemple, and Imhotep’s attempts to seduce her.
And speaking of, there’s some compelling stuff in that. Helen oscillates between fear of, desire for, and complete ignorance of Imhotep as his mental manipulations work their sway, and the whole past-lives and reincarnation angle gets a chilling and tragic twist in a single line: “There’s something living inside of me! And it wants to kill me! I want to live, but it wants to live too!”
But the most telling is in a parallel involving Anck Su Namun herself. In the original, she is the daughter of the priest and the temple priestess seduced by her colleague. In the remake they are split into two entirely separate characters, and Evelyn’s connection to the ancient past only comes up at all in the sequel. This robs the alleged remake of the original’s central plot, and leaves a lot of loose ends waving. Imhotep’s obsession with Evelyn becomes a plot hole, for one.
Imhotep does eventually find a reincarnated version of his girlfriend, and kills her so that she can be reborn, which falls flat when she’s already stalking about preening about how she is his lover, and doesn’t actually change at all after stabbing herself. It’s just a lot harder to care when it’s been reduced to a side story told entirely between the villains.
. . . .
The original’s got some fairly serious problems, too.
Down to some combination of acting and directing, many of the compelling ideas in the original Mummy just don’t land. That whole bit with the hotshot archaeologist I waxed about above? Didn’t work for me, even though I could see what the beats were going for. Helen’s split personality troubles grappling with a past life? We never see enough of Anck su Namun to get a sense of it, the acting doesn’t carry off that internal struggle, except maybe for one brief scene where she’s bedridden. And when Anck su Namun does appear, it turns out she actually is basically Helen after all, which makes Imhotep’s insistence on dunking her in boiling formaldehyde pretty cray-cray. The Nubian? Barely a character. It’s more interesting for what is conceptually going on than for the actual execution of the premise.
Bizarrely, the first two remake films inherited many of these problems, despite how little they take directly from the original. I’ve mentioned how evil Anck-su is killed halfway through the movie without any change in character. Imhotep in both movies tells the baffling speech about how he needs to kill his lover so she can be properly reborn, despite her standing in front of him saying how much she loves him.
There’s also a weird relationship with whether or not the mummy is a sympathetic character. On the one hand, I got an impression that everyone was treating him as a monster, even before he started murdering people and kidnapping young women, which seemed a bit unfair. And throughout, especially near the end, he seemed to be hyper-crazy so that things couldn’t be resolved except by way of his re-death. It worked better for me this time than I remember it the last time but it was still noticeable.
At the same time, the mummy’s backstory is pure sympathy. He watched over her on her death bed, and Karloff puts a lot of emotion and sorrow into his voice recounting how he betrayed the gods, and in his furtive acting for the interrupted resurrection scene. And then he was horribly killed, disrespected, and buried in an unmarked grave. And then there was the whole ridiculous business of leaving no witnesses, kill the slaves and everyone who killed the slaves, which doesn’t really speak well of the pharaoh, to be taking after Watchmen’s Ozymandius (though more likely that character was inspired by this scene, if anything).
That ambiguity could even be interpreted as a form of multiculturalism. No judgment is passed on the Pharaoh for upholding the gods’ will, or his brutal coverup of his crackdown on the heresy, any more than it passes on the sorcerer who broke the taboos in the first place, his guilt (in life, if lost sometime in the eons since his punishment) is all his own. This is just the way things were, the film seems to say, though I don’t imagine they would want to see a return to form. The mummy’s use of blood magic to make the Nubian his slave again is decried by the same man who earlier heeded those to respect the gods and their curses, and Helen née Namun pleads with Imhotep and Isis alike that she wishes to live in the world that is now, freed of the bonds that were. Let the dead lie, the film says.
It is much more concerned about modern looters messing with forces they don’t understand in the pursuit of fame and profit, though what exactly it wants to say about it is unclear. The father figure admonishes the young hotshots against such chauvinist thinking in favor of knowledge and learning (it is more important that the artifacts were uncovered at all than that they wound up in the British Museum, he says when his son complains that Cairo got to keep the loot of its history for its own), but never strongly, and everyone agrees, when presented with a scroll thought lost forever, of great symbolic significance (and literal power over death itself), that it needs to be burned.
The Mummy remakes are much more judgmental. In the first, our first framing of the situation is the starstruck lovers meeting in secret, it’s all very Romeo and Juliet, and then the Pharaoh stalks in demanding who touched his property. The following regicide is pretty reasonably interpreted as self-defense, backstab or no.
In the sequel, where the mummies are solidly established as world-conquering overlords and suddenly the Pharaoh is related to somebody important (padre de alguien) all signs of overbearing possessiveness are gone, or any sense of villainy (unless you count the gladiatorial catfight, but in a fight between his fiancé and daughter he clearly wasn’t expecting anyone to die). Anck su Namun is revealed to be the true villainess all along, the love between her and Imhotep faked (or at least, weak willed).
It reminded me of the relationship between the 1933 King Kong and its 2005 remake. Though The Mummy I feel is the better adaptation overall, far less faithful to the literal text, but closer in spirit to the original, even if most of what it adapts are the original’s problems, and none of its nuance.
Mom says they were mixing histories, “vestal virgins” were a Roman thing. Mom thinks that those who broke their vows were buried alive.
Apparently, archaeologists falling for their mummified finds was also an actual thing. I know it was something hanging in the air back then, the seductive mummy was evidently the usual depiction thereof prior to Karloff’s menacing grimace (thanks TV Tropes!), but I didn’t think it literally happened. Whoof!
But wait, there’s more…
So there you have it. The original Mummy is more conceptually interesting than successfully executed, but stands alongside its monster mash brothers-in-arms Dracula and Adam Frankenstein, and its remakes are… fine. I’ve seen worse, though they’re not really the sort of films I would recommend, even for dumb action fare there are films I would pick ahead of them, and certainly not something that, had I seen them first, would have inclined me on seeing the much-maligned third entry.
I still remembered liking the third Mummy film, though. Maybe it was the time and place, having fun with a friend not seen for a long time? Maybe the film is better than it’s given credit for? Well, there was only one thing to do: resurrect this corpse one more time, so we could put it to rest for good. Join me tomorrow, where we do just that, with a review of “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor”.
“Surprisingly Adult Children’s Animated Parody Superhero Flicks”
Hello all! It’s time for another entry in my rambling style of film reviews. Today is a double-header, covering the modern classics of Dreamwork’s Megamind (2010) and Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004), which I watched back-to-back recently. The city center is cleared, the populace flees in terror, in this fight for the finish, will the cultural juggernaut of The Incredibles reign supreme, or will the ever-hopeful underdog Megamind squeak out a win? Spoiler warning: they’re superheroes, of course they’re going to team up.
Oh and fair warning, spoilers!
Continue reading ““Surprisingly Adult Children’s Animated Parody Superhero Flicks””
Dreams of a Desert Sheep 