October Watch: Clue (1985)

I totally cheated and am calling Clue (1985) a Halloween movie because of the big, spooky mansion.  Really, I have no other excuse.  I mean, there are murders a-plenty, but it's not exactly even a spoof on movies like House on Haunted Hill.

But it is a great cast, with one of the funniest humans to ever walk the earth, Ms. Madeline Kahn.  She doesn't get a lot to do in this ensemble piece, and she's competing with Colleen Camp squeezed into a maid's uniform and Lesley Ann Warren given a bigger piece of the plot.  Of course, the movie stars Tim Curry, Martin Mull, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Eileen Brennan and FEAR frontman Lee Ving.

Anyway, Clue is still Clue, and it still has one of my favorite Madeline Kahn moments.



So, you got that going for you.

Octoberama! Ava Gardner!

Ms. Ava Gardner is swooping in to provide you with a little Halloween excitement!

Happy 117th to Buster Keaton

Happy Birthday to the great genius of cinema.

October Watch: Lake Mungo (2008)

Remember when I said "hey, give me some ideas for spooky movies to watch during October?"  Well, some of you humans did so.

One of those humans was Nathaniel Capp, who recommended the 2008 documentary Lake Mungo to me.  I knew it was Australian and creepy, and that's all he'd told me.  "Go in without knowing anything" he said, and so I did.  To discuss the movie is to spoil the movie, so...  anything you read below is your problem.

But I will say, it is definitely some decent October Halloween viewing.

Okay.  SPOILERS NOW.

Octoberama! Audrey Totter!

Audrey Totter looks sweet enough, but she might also know how to use that knife.

Getting Your Hands on Louise Brooks

Despite my more than occasional posting of images of silent-era actress Louise Brooks, I haven't seen that many movies in which she appears or stars.  The DVD and Blu-Ray market never found the conversion of silent films profitable, and the legal streaming market hasn't caught up with the massive backlog of what has been preserved (Netflix currently has four Brooks films, one of them is streaming - and that fifth one is a doc, not a Brooks movie).

Why this is, I don't know.  I don't know how Netflix and other companies make the decision to stream films, but I am familiar with the incurred cost that comes with taking up bandwidth, at least when it comes to AWS.   I assume the math is complex.

TV.  Why you no stream this at me?

Octoberama! Ann Miller!

We refuse to not post pictures of Ann Miller in witch costumes.

Groucho Marx - 122 years young today

Happy Birthday to a great American, Groucho Marx.

Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?

                                               -Groucho Marx

If I need to say anything else about Groucho, you need to go back to the beginning and start over.

Opera Watch: Götterdämmerung - We Wrap It Up with Opera #4

People, let me start at the end and the advice I have for you:

If you see some gold at the bottom of The Rhine, just leave it.

Okay.

more or less how Jamie sends me off to work on Mondays

We broke up the fourth and final of The Ring Cycle Operas up into three separate viewings, one per act, as the opera stretched over roughly five hours of TV time. Götterdämmerung (in Ingles, The Twilight of the Gods) catches us up with our hero, Siegfried and his beloved bride, the fallen Brünnhilde as they make pronouncements of eternal love to one another. What we know, that they did not see in the previous scene, was that The Norns (basically, The Fates) have foreseen the end of The Gods and bad times for everyone associated.

Octoberama! Joan Crawford!

Each day of October, we'll be counting down to Halloween with Signal Watch Worthy imagery, movie reviews, posts, etc...

If you want to contribute anything from pictures to guest posts, feel free to contact me, and let's do it!

For our first post, what's creepier than a smashingly happy Joan Crawford?  I believe this is Halloween, 1933.