The Motion Never Stops

Before I get to my special theme for this month which I'll post in a couple of days, I just wanted to take a quick opportunity to note the passing of Ray Harryhausen, special effects pioneer extraordinaire.

It's a shame we don't have visualists like him around anymore - I have never really liked CGI, I think that 99% of the time that computer graphics will never look as good as a real physical object... even if the computer image is excellent and the physical object is kinda cheesy.  I just don't think that we can make CG that looks real yet.  And I realize when I say this that computer programming and graphics are hard work, but I just don't think that the FX of today can stand up just because it's too *easy*... a director and an effects supervisor can just sit down at a computer and bash out what they want with none of the painstaking labor and craftsmanship that used to be put into movie visuals... by people like Mr. Harryhausen.

His movies occupy a special place in my collection.  I have always enjoyed fantasy and science fiction films (no!) and I remember watching some of Harryhausen's movies like Jason and the Argonauts whenever they would come on TV.  His fantasy movie collection also happens to be one of the oldest DVD boxsets that I own, having got it as a gift close to ten years ago now.  I have had ample to time to enjoy the fruits of his labors, again and again and again and again.

And in this age of home video thankfully everyone can.  So here's to you Mr. Ray Harryhausen.  I would say I hope you go to heaven if there is one, but I don't think they have any cool monsters there.

Wait For It....

Megalon says to BE PATIENT

– a very special event is being planned for next month.

Ghost Writer In The Sky....

Roger Ebert died today.  It's kind of weird when you think about it.  Sometimes we get so used to certain people being around it's so damn... strange when they no longer inhabit our plane of existence.  I had the same feeling after James Brown died... I suddenly lived in a world without James Brown, and that seemed both bizarre and unacceptable at the same time.  But, you say, James Brown was a creator, an inventor - he basically invented funk music, he was the Godfather of Soul, he influenced whole musical genres in addition to artists with his music.  Roger Ebert was a film critic, his whole job was just to analyze what other people created and tell an audience whether he thought they should see it or not.  How can he be considered special?

Well, Roger Ebert actually worked on a couple of movies himself.  No he wasn't a director or actor but he was a (surprise) writer, writing a couple of movies for Russ Meyer in the 70s, one of which being the infamous Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls.  Both of these movies were very, very bad (but in a laughable, fun kinda way).  But the point is, Ebert *did it*.  He actually participated in filmmaking, understood the process.  When Roger Ebert criticized some movie for being bad, he would know because he wrote some bad movies himself.  This is more than most movie critics could and can do.  Nowadays your average film critic is just some hack who took writing and film courses in college and thinks that they know more than you will ever know about film just because they studied it in school.  The sad truth is that anyone who can pick up a book and read or sit still enough to watch a movie for a couple of hours can write a half-intelligent movie review.  But few can write movies reviews well and with  true knowledge of the craft, and Ebert was one of them.

Even when he was wrong.  I remember reading a negative review of his on the original 1954 Godzilla.  I was nearly foaming at the mouth and proclaiming that Ebert wouldn't know a good movie if it came up and bit him in the ass.  But you know what?  I had that reaction because his opinion *mattered*... because he wrote well.  Most other reviewers (few can actually be called true critics) don't get that kind of response out of me.  I read their shit and say, "Hmm", and forget about it a minute later, even if I find their viewpoint contentious.  Ebert made you care with his opinion, and that is rare in modern film criticism, where most writers are just trying to impress you with their writing "talent."

I actually have no pretenses to Mr. Ebert's job.  I am not a film critic.  I am simply some dude on the internet ejaculating forth his opinions because it gives him an excuse to write, to hone his composition skills.  If someone comes along and engages me on something I wrote, that's great but it's not my purpose.  The point to all this is, Roger Ebert was a true film critic and I am not, but I'm writing this tribute anyway because... I want to.  It's not some gushing from one professional to another but some honest thoughts from someone who enjoyed reading his stuff.  Even if no one else sees this I want to write how much his film reviews and writing in general meant to me.  Even if he was dead wrong sometimes.

And that was the fun part.

Clarification

This is just a short notice that as of today The Pharonic Fantasy Theatre will now have a ratings system.  Why now instead of from the beginning?  Well, in the beginning I figured that I wanted people to actually read my reviews in order to ascertain my attitude towards a particular movie or TV show instead of taking the easy shortcut and just looking at a number at the bottom of the screen, but after hundreds of emails and comments from my die-hard fanbase I have realized that I want to make everyone's life easier and quicker and get readers onto and off of my little corner of the internet just a little faster.  Besides, all of the malcontents are right - It *is* too hard to read through paragraph after paragraph of review just to find out if you want to see a movie or not.  That's too much work.  Work is hard.  Quality must be quantified.

So, without further ado, I give you the New Pharonic Fantasy Theatre Patented Movie And TV Show Ratings System™.

I will rate all pieces of media on a scale of 1 to 77, except Japanese pornographic anime, which is rated 1 to 69, and anything produced by Michael Bay, which will be rated from -500 to 2.  After the number rating I will have a content marker, to warn parents and other sensitive souls about any icky content, and then another number saying how many times this ickyness occurs in the said media, followed by a division or multiplication sign designating what time of day you should watch this particular item.   Disturbing Content markers are as follows:

V for Violence
N for Nudity
S for Sex
D for Drugs
T for graphic Torture
AS for Adult Situations
A for any Annoying sidekick character that makes you throw something at the television
P for any Prison scenes
R for Rape or sexual assault
I for any graphic displays of Illness or disease
L for Language
F for any Foreign Content
OO for gratuitous bOObs
LS for Low Sodium content
FX for any bad effects
W for William Shatner

Well, there you go.  From now on, all of my reviews will use this simple, easy-to-understand system to help you the reader figure out whether you want to see something instead of slogging through all the crap I write.


Next Week:  pictures from my oiled-up orgy with the German ladies' all-nude horseshoe team.

How To And How Not To Celebrate The Birthday Of A Famous Filmmaker

Today is the birthday of Akira Kurosawa, who would have been 103 this year.  To mark the occasion, Hulu is putting up a good chunk of his movies free to view for the duration of the entire weekend.

However, I must warn any potential viewer *NOT* to take them up on this, as without Hulu Plus (which you have to pay for) you get multiple ads during the movies.  I started watching one, and about fifteen minutes in was suddenly rudely shocked by having an advertisement for Spring Breakers shoved into my face.  This is akin to having a five-star gourmet Italian meal and having venom-covered wood spikes rammed into your eyeballs and goat diarrhea poured down your throat every fifteen minutes.  Not worth it.

I understand if you want to put ads on during your TV shows, Hulu.  Hell, even doing that with most movies is fine, I understand you have to make money.  But not Kurosawa.  Having you do this is like me going to a Jewish synagogue wearing a Passion Of The Christ t-shirt or running naked into a Catholic cathedral during mass and screaming "FUCK THE DEVIL!  FUCK THE DEVIL!" while masturbating and shitting everywhere.

So anyway, if you want to commemorate Kurosawa's birthday and watch one of his movies, I suggest that you just go out and buy one of them - Seven Samurai is a good choice if you haven't already seen it, and if you haven't you need to buy it now... every movie collection is incomplete without Seven Samurai.  After that you can pick from any of his work... you can't go wrong with a Kurosawa movie.

Ars On The Ides Of Mars

This month on Netflix I happened to watch two biopics about two artists, both based on novels, produced ten years apart, depicting men who lived roughly 300 years apart and who made two different types of art.  I hadn't actually intended to do this but once I watched both I started to draw some parallels and make some comparisons - as well as think about how one could be so good and one could basically suck.  Today I give you a short, badly written essay on a comparison and contrast of Magic Fire and The Agony And The Ecstasy, or "How To and How Not To Do a Biographical Movie About An Artist".

Magic Fire is about the life of Richard Wagner (whose bicentennial is this year, incidentally) made in 1955 by Republic Pictures, which by that time was on its last legs as a viable film studio.  The Agony and The Ecstasy is a film about Michelangelo Buonarroti and his painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling produced in 1965 and starring Charlton Heston as the tortured artist and Rex Harrison as the warrior pope who commissions him to create the great work.

The difference between the two is like night and day.  Magic Fire is a cheesy biopic which tries to compress the entire life of the most important and influential composer of music next to Bach and Beethoven down into two hours and achieves in telling us nothing about the man or how monumental his work is and how it affected all of the art of the nineteenth century and beyond.  To director William Dieterle, the whole thing is just an exercise in showing how Wagner could be something of a vain egotist while making some pretty music and pining after a series of women, instead of showing how truly radical his ideas were, while maybe even showing some of the man's truly dark tendencies and his genuinely complex relationships with the other human beings in his life.  This movie could have been an opportunity to show the paradox of the artist and the dichotomy between what a man is and the art that he can produce.  But alas, Dieterle just gives us a shallow, melodramatic two hours of nothing.  There is no dramatic point to this massive cheese-beast.  The film zooms along from one point in Wagner's life to another - it all feels so scatter-shot.  The actors don't look like the historical personages that they are supposed to portray.  There are historical inaccuracies (a given in any historical picture).  Even the music, which should of course be a highlight is arranged by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in a choppy "best of" manner which never even lets us hear a whole selection before it's off into another cornily played bit from another opera. Oh well, at least it was filmed on location in Europe so some of the backgrounds are accurate (and pretty).

The Agony And The Ecstasy attempts to do the opposite - give us just one incident in the life of Michelangelo and build a dramatic conflict and exploration of an artist around it.  Directed by Carol Reed, this movie accomplishes what the last film does not.  We are presented with real questions - what drives an artist to create?  How far will he go to do it?  How does one find one's purpose in life?  How does the relationship of one person to another affect their work or vice versa?  What is the true impact of our lives on this world?  What the answers to some of these questions are of course will be up to the viewer which is the beauty of this movie - everything is not laid out on a platter and the viewer must find their own meaning.  The direction and the acting are better, too.  Charlton Heston gives a great account as Michelangelo, making him both sympathetic and infuriating, sometimes all at he same time.  Rex Harrison is of course basically Rex Harrison for the duration of the movie but manages to portray both Pope Julius' violent arrogance and surprising humility in the face of true art and beauty.  The interplay between the two is classic - this film works as a character study in itself in addition to the qualities I have mentioned.  They even manage the illusion of the Sistine Chapel being in the process of being painted, which must have been truly challenging.  The only things I didn't like were the tacked-on semi-romantic subplot (standard in movies of the 1950s and 60s but thankfully not overdone here) and the twelve minute art history lesson in the beginning.  It's rather clunky and unnecessary - I know who Michelangelo was and what his major works were, thanks.

In the end the recommendation is obvious - The Agony And The Ecstasy is a classic film worthy of any Netflix queue, whilst Magic Fire should be viewed by die-hard Wagner fans only, and only if they feel slightly masochistic... while getting a few chuckles from it over how corny it is.  And to all the directors out there not reading this I say:  when making a bio film of a great artist, try to focus on one work or point in their life and how it affected them and the world and try to give us some real drama out of it, instead of trying to cram the totality of their life and work into a short time-span, making everything empty and pointless.  

Ah, who am I kiddin'. 

Ahh! It's Ishiro Honda!

Today marks the 20th Anniversary of the death of director Ishiro Honda.  It's a sobering thought if you sit back and think about it – twenty years without the father of the Japanese Giant Monster Movie.  Objectively I can say (like most people) that Akira Kurosawa was the greatest Japanese film director of all time (in fact, he was probably the best director ever, period) but if I had to be completely honest with myself I would have to say that after quite a bit of reflection that Honda is my favorite Japanese film director of all time... his movies have resonated with me ever since I was a kid and have been responsible for more joy in my life than any of his countrymen, talented as they are.  Today I thought I would just share why I like Honda's movies so much and why you should check them out too.

Of course Ishiro Honda will always be remembered primarily for unleashing on the world that atomic behemoth, the radioactive flame-shooting grey dinosaur Godzilla.  For this alone he deserves to remembered more than he is... especially since the first Godzilla film – which was released in 1954, not even a decade after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – is such a serious movie.  There is nothing conditional as to why this should be included in "All-Time-Greatest" lists ("Well, you know, it's cheesy but it's *fun*, man" or "Yeah, the story is crap but the special effects are revolutionary!").  This is just a great film, period, and the reason that it is so great is because the story really isn't about Godzilla per se but about the effect that he has on society and everyday people, and the ramifications of trying to destroy such a threat to society and what methods are acceptable in doing so.  The movie does it with great atmosphere, too.  Everything feels so deadly and somber... there is none of the lightheartedness that permeates the later Godzilla movies (and indeed later kaiju films in general) – here Godzilla is a terrifying, primordial force of destruction and anguish.   Is it perfect?  No, of course not.  Some of the acting later on in the film can be a little overwrought and some of the film comes off as a little crude (it's a Japanese film made in the early fifties).  But by the end of the whole thing you will feel like you have seen something special.

It's a testament to Honda's film craft that he could go from this somber type of film to more light fare, especially in the same film series.  While the first Godzilla movie is deadly serious the ones that followed ended up becoming more geared towards children, but that didn't mean that the quality necessarily went down (at least until the seventies under different directors).  Honda managed to keep things entertaining and well-made for the next decade is a testament to his talent (okay, King Kong vs Godzilla wasn't that great but that's mainly because he let things get a little too silly with that shoddy gorilla suit... ugh).  Mothra vs Godzilla is the highlight of the Sixties Godzilla movies, with the big G still being the bad guy and the story going into fantasy territory with the giant lepidopteran and her twin singing fairies (introduced previously in their own movie, directed by... you guessed it) taking up a good chunk of the run-time.  The best Godzilla film of the Seventies, Terror of Mechagodzilla, was also directed by Honda, and while featuring the star mutant lizard as the hero brought back some of the seriousness of the early days while still being a fun movie.  I recommend both movies in addition to the first highly.

But really I can recommend any Ishiro Honda movie, especially if you have children or just want to relive a little part of your childhood yourself.  In addition to his monster movies (he also gave us Rodan) Honda also made general fantasy and adventure films, like Atragon which is about a flying sub that battles the ancient undersea kingdom of Mu.  That's the kind of movie they need more of these days, especially movies aimed at kids - less product placement and overloading of the senses, and more good, old fashioned adventure.

But the final praise that I think I can give the main is that he was capable of more than just harmless fun – he knew how to put real drama on the screen, and he didn't always need a giant black & white reptile to do it.  I mentioned the horror movie Matango in my first Halloween post a while back, and it is still one of the masterpieces of the genre... not because of the titular mushroom monstrosities but because of the effect that the mushroom monstrosities have on the people in the story... and more importantly the effect that those people have on themselves.  Matango is Honda's most adult film – there are undercurrents of power, hate, lust and primal savagery right beneath the exteriors of all of these island castaways... if the fungal menace didn't start getting them they would kill each other.  It really is Gilligan's Island in Hell... or to say Gilligan's Island in Real Life (Hell, Matango came first... Toho could've sued).

The point is that Ishiro Honda was perhaps the most versatile Japanese director of all... he could do just about anything, from serious drama (his first movies before he did Gojira were simple dramas) to action to horror to science fiction to pure fantasy.  It's no wonder Kurosawa had him as his assistant on Kagemusha and Ran.

So here's to you, Mr. Honda.  Hopefully there are still a lot of people who remember you and cherish your contribution to the moving picture, from children who delight in your fantasies to adults who value your dark drama to the children in all adults who just enjoy a good movie and a little fun.