Month: September 2020

The Rookie Bear (1941)

THE ROOKIE BEAR (1941)
Article 4916 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-2-2015
Directed by Rudolf Ising
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Cartoon

A hibernating bear discovers that he is the first one to be drafted into the army.

This cartoon is a comic snapshot of the process of being drafted and inducted into the army, which was no doubt a very topical subject at the time of our entry into World War II. It’s not a great cartoon, but it does have some good moments, and is a fairly amusing curio of its time. The anthropomorphic bear is the main fantastic content, though a few of the sight gags also cross the line into the fantastic. It’s a solid if unspectacular effort.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

La muerte enamorada (1951)

LA MUERTE ENAMORADA (1951)
aka Death in Love
Article 4915 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-1-2015
Directed by Ernesto Cortazar
Featuring Miroslava, Fernando Fernandez, Jorge Reyes
Country: Mexico
What it is: Death personified comedy

An insurance agent who has wasted is life is visited by Death (a beautiful woman in black). Instead of taking him immediately, she offers him a few extra days of life if she can move in with him and experience what it’s like to be a human.

My copy of this movie is in Spanish without English subtitles, and much of what happens is dialogue-driven, so I’m really not in a good position to give a real evaluation of the movie. However, it does appear to be a good movie. The acting is quite strong, especially from Miroslava in the role of Death. Certain moments do come through; there’s a subplot involving Death’s attachment to a young girl, and we have several scenes of the insurance agent unsuccessfully attempting suicide. Given the language barrier, easily the most striking scene for me occurs when Death has a dream where she watches a musical troupe of skeletons perform a jazzed up version of Camille Saint-Saens’ “Danse macabre”; it’s a fun number and is only marred by the fact that the dancers don’t appear to be in sync with each other. Overall, it feels like a comic take on DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, and despite the language barrier, it left a good impression on me.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Steppenwolf (1974)

STEPPENWOLF (1974)
Article 4914 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-31-2015
Directed by Fred Haines
Featuring Max von Sydow, Dominique Sanda, Pierre Clementi
Country: USA / Switzerland / UK / France / Italy
What it is: Literary adaptation

A middle-aged man, torn between the spirit and the flesh, plans to commit suicide upon reaching fifty, but meets a woman who steers his life in a new direction.

One of the primary differences between reading a novel and watching a movie is that movies are meant to be watched as a piece from beginning to end at a specific pace, whereas novels may be picked up and set down at will, or read at different paces depending on the time it takes to grasp the themes at play in them. I’ve not read the Herman Hesse novel on which this is based; for that matter, I’ve not read any of his work at all. However, one impression I get from the movie is that the book delves into philosophical and psychoanalytic matters that require a certain degree of time to ponder and appreciate; unfortunately, a movie version doesn’t really give you that amount of time unless you try to swallow the whole thing at once. The movie does a game job of trying to express some of the concepts at play here; there’s an animated section that seeks to explain the concept of the “steppenwolf” (the wild beast within us that is the other side of our natures). Certainly, once you’ve grasped this concept, parts of the movie seem much clearer, even simplistic and obvious. However, as the movie digs deeper, it becomes more of a chore to grasp the relevance of what you’re seeing, and it’s very easy to get lost and confused in the final third of the movie, where the protagonist visits a surreal, non-realistic place called the “magic theater” to open doors to the various parts of his soul. It’s at moments like these where I find it more useful to see the film as a path to the novel rather than as being a stand-alone entity. The film is also hampered by the fact that several major characters have some very thick accents which make it rather difficult to discern what’s being said. The fantastic content revolves around the definite non-realistic manifestations of the story (people disappearing, signs appearing out of nowhere, the symbolic “magic theater”). In the end, I suspect that any chance of really grasping what’s going on here is to go to the book.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Revenge of the Teenage Vixens from Outer Space (1985)

THE REVENGE OF THE TEENAGE VIXENS FROM OUTER SPACE (1985)
Article 4913 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-30-2015
Directed by Jeff A. Ferrell
Featuring Lisa Schwedop, Howard Scott, Amy Crumpacker
Country: USA
What it is: Alien babes on a budget

Drawn to Earth by a misdelivered teen magazine, several female space aliens seek men for mating, but swear revenge when the men prove disappointing.

I initially mistook this one for a Troma film; between the title and the fact that the opening shot of the movie looks similar to the Troma logo is what threw me off. Nevertheless, the title alone would lead you to believe that this was going to be like a Troma film – intentionally bad tongue-in-cheek horror/sci-fi with a plethora of exploitation elements (read: nudity). Oh, it’s quite bad, but what do you really expect from a movie which reportedly was shot on a budget of $32,000 over a four-year period with a cast of what mostly appears to be rank amateurs. But those looking for the exploitation elements will be sorely disappointed; there’s some near nudity in a couple of scenes, but the only thing that might have kept this one from a PG rating was a little too much cussing. Occasionally, a specific humorous touch will work; for example, I like that the old school has a sign in front of it that says “Old School”. But it’s mostly just dumb and amateurish. Keep your expectations very low.

1 CommentLeave a comment

An Eccentric Burglary (1905)

AN ECCENTRIC BURGLARY (1905)
Article 4912 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-29-2015
Directed by Frank S. Mottershaw
Cast unknown
Country: UK
What it is: Odd trick film

Two Chinese men attempt a robbery, but end up on the run from two policemen.

The plot description above doesn’t give a hint of the fantastic content, and except for an anomalous moment where a horse mysteriously vanishes, there’s really no fantastic content in the story as such. However, in execution, many of the characters perform stunts that are either impossible or (at the very least) very strange. The movie makes extensive use of the technique of running footage backwards, and what sets this one apart a little from some of the others is that the scenes are often performed by the actors to give the illusion that the footage is not running backwards until you reach the impossible stunt. People jump from the ground to second story windows, slide up banisters and ladders, etc. Every once in a while the backwards footage is more blatant, such as a scene where the policemen are chasing a horse and buggy and we see them running backwards. It’s a little odd and it doesn’t quite work, but it does feel different from a lot of the other trick films of the time; I think this may be the first time I’ve heard of the director, though he did have quite a few credits under his belt.

0 CommentsLeave a comment