Noir Watch: The Third Man (1949)

In general, it seems that at some point someone will suggest The Third Man (1949) to you.  I know the name had been thrown at me for years, especially when I started digging into film noir, but there seemed to be a certain lack of availability to the movie, and I wasn't going to just buy it on DVD of Amazon, site unseen.

new poster by ace artist Francesco Francavilla

A year or three ago, it was included in the Paramount Summer Film Series, our local grand theater's showcase of classic film.* Jamie and I went and saw it, sitting up in the balcony (my prime spot).  And while I often watch and enjoy a movie, it is all too rare that I go back to that place where I can both become utterly absorbed in a movie and enjoy the construction of the movie simultaneously.  these days, even if I enjoy the hell out of a movie - let's say Captain America 2, for example, I'm generally just enjoying watching a fun entertainment with characters I like, blowing up floating aircraft carriers and whatnot.

But The Third Man takes me not just back to how much I liked the parts of a film during film school, but wanting to take it all apart and look at how it's assembled - the reason I wanted to go to film school - more to learn how it all worked more than I suspect I ever really had any intention of going off to be the next jodhpur-clad director that America did not need.

Happy Birthday, Harrison Ford!

Happy Birthday, Harrison Ford!  You are the best actor who is in all the best movies.  So, well done, man.

Today you're 73, but let's review just a few of the times you've been awesome.

You totally showed up in a bit part in Apocalypse Now.  I was not expecting that at all.

You were kind of way cooler than Richie Cunningham in American Graffiti.

You were fake-Amish in Witness.

Noir Watch: Red Light (1949)

This wasn't my favorite movie, so I'll keep it short.

Red Light (1949) tells the story of a successful San Francisco trucking magnate played by George Raft*, whose brother has returned from service as an Army chaplain and will now be going full time as a Catholic Priest, complete with his own church.  The brother is killed (by Harry Morgan! at the direction of Raymond Burr!) in a revenge scheme as Raft sent up Burr for some crooked dealings.

This poster is basically lying about what this movie is about.  

Raft's dying brother whispers to him that if he's looking for who killed him, the answer is in the Gideon's Bible in his room.  Raft goes to claim it and it's disappeared, so he runs around the Southwest trying to find the Bible, as any of five people could have taken it.  Virgina Mayo is one of those folks, and she gets wrapped up in helping George Raft and being very white bread and pretty.

In any movie you see him in, Raft has more or less one mode, and here it's tilted toward impatient anger from the moment his brother dies.  I don't know that the performance is flat, exactly, but sometimes the line delivery can be all so one-note, it becomes almost funny.

There's a sort of weird mid-20th Century evangelism to the movie, with Raft maybe learning the lessons in the Bible are there for men like him who are in real trouble - including a sort of homily from a soldier who (in a goofy flashback sequence) contemplates suicide until a window washer leaps through the window and saves him.

It all sort of feels like Reader's Digest got it's hands on your standard potboiler noir and said "I know how to spruce this up!".

Anyway, not really my cup of tea.


*Raft also played a trucking magnate in They Drive By Night, which was just a better movie by anyone's measure.

Pirate Watch: Treasure Island (1950)

After watching Johnny Tremain, I've been curious as to how the other Disney live-action films of my youth hold up.  I won't likely be reviewing Son of Flubber for example, but some of the more "adventure" type titles I haven't seen in a while are on Amazon streaming, so...  here we go.

I don't know how many times I watched this one as a kid, but it was more than once.  And, I read the book when I was 10, which is really the perfect time to read Treasure Island.  At 10, I wasn't terribly interested in romance in my books, and there's absolutely none to be had in the novel, but I was interested in pirates and cutthroats and treasure chests and maps (my second grade teacher, two years prior, had known this so much she brought me a souvenir treasure map from The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, and I studied it like it was going to find me a genuine treasure).

The New "Superman v. Batman" trailer exists, so here goes

Circa 2002, before Superman Returns, WB really, really wanted to do a Superman vs. Batman movie, and it even got a reference in a billboard in the background of I Am Legend.  This was just after the success of Spider-Man and X-Men, and WB was trying to figure out to jumpstart the DC heroes, something they'd sort of ignored in the wake of the slow death of the Batman franchise under Joel Schumacher.

As I recall, the storyline for the script was that Batman had been around for a while, gotten married, semi-retired, etc... but then along comes Superman who has a super-fight, and in the battle, somehow Bruce's wife is killed as a bystander.  In this version, in order to keep up with Superman, Batman makes a deal with Satan or something and gets magical powers in order to stay toe-to-toe with Superman until, of course, they had someone else to go fight.

Never make a deal with this guy

A script leaked a couple of years ago has a different version, but, again, Bruce loses a spouse but Superman just says "hey, don't kill nobody, okay?" which Batman totally wants to do.  It involves Joker clones and a lot of painting oneself into a corner, narratively

If you're keeping score, even WB - the people who brought us Catwoman, Jonah Hex and Green Lantern - decided against the green light on this script, maybe deciding we first needed to remind America what Superman looked like.

Well, when Man of Steel did pretty well, but word of mouth wasn't all that great and it wasn't clear WB could just roll out a Superman sequel and expect success, they finally went ahead and pulled the trigger on the Batman/ Superman meet-up, and - if nothing else - they hopefully finally got it out of their system and came up with a product that will give everyone the same entirely unsatisfactory match-up that's occurred in every superhero comic, ever, where neither wins and they become friends so they can go off and fight the other threat that was a bigger deal than their little misunderstanding.

Here's the new trailer, by the way.

Signal Watch Reads: Tarzan of the Apes (1912) - audiobook

I have no idea if kids today even know the name Tarzan, and I suspect that if they do, its as one of the lesser Disney animated features.  As a product of the 70's and 80's, I was exposed to televised reruns of Johnny Weismuller films, comics, cartoons, and a general presence of Tarzan as a still-kinda-relevant pop-culture figure.  Swinging from a rope meant you had to give the Weismuller yell, climbing a tree might lead to visions of swinging from branch to branch, and being a bit rambunctious could lead to your mother calling you "Tarzan".

I also had this comic magazine, Marvel Super Special #29.

It turns out, this was a pretty much direct adaptation of the original novel, including captions from the book, but only the first 1/2- 1/3rd of the book, choosing a solid ending point when Tarzan asserts himself as King of the Apes.  Mark Evanier is listed as the writer, but he mostly reframed the original novel into a graphic novel form, and that cover seemed absolutely amazing to me when I was a kid.  It also meant that, as the book went along, I had more or less already read the first 1/3rd.

I haven't read much in the way of Edgar Rice Burroughs, just the first three John Carter-Barsoom novels, but I certainly grew up knowing Burroughs' name.  I just...  I dunno, I never read the book or books (there are about 20 of them, I think).  But, we're in a reading pattern right now that's about making up for old sins and checking in on some of these old-school favorites, and I'd put off reading Tarzan for long enough.

Noir Watch: Key Largo (1948)

I didn't have a particular reason I'd missed Key Largo (1948), but somehow I'd never gotten around to watching it, which is crazy.  Just the three names above the title should have been enough to get me to seek it out, and had I noticed Claire Trevor and Lionel Barrymore are also in the movie AND its directed by John Huston...

Anyway, better late than never.

Still adrift three years after the war, Major Frank McCloud stops by the hotel where he knows the father and wife of one of his brothers-in-arms from the Italy campaign are residing, way down in Key Largo, Florida.  His comrade was killed in action, and its not clear McCloud is doing terribly well on this side of the war.

But when he arrives at the hotel, it's the summer off-season, he can't immediately find his buddy's father or wife, and there are a few toughs hanging around the hotel bar with a blonde who seems like maybe she lives at the bottom of a bottle.

During all this, the local authorities are out looking for a couple of Native Americans who ran off from jail.  And, of course, a hurricane is blowing in.

We learn too late that the men are part of Johnny Rocco's gang, an old school gangster who was deported years ago and who is trying to make his way back into the US.

Awesome Watch: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Back when I was in high school, when the Kevin Costner movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out, I believe it was TNT that counter-programmed by showing the 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood that opening weekend.  In conjunction, they held a telephone call-in poll for which the audience liked better, and, holy @#$% did the 1938 version win by a landslide.

And, even when you're at that age when you're like "oh, new movies are inherently better", I was pretty darn aware that this movie was way, way better than the Costner version.  I certainly didn't think the 90's version was bad, if you ignored the cheesy Bryan Adams theme and Costner's accent, but The Adventures of Robin Hood felt like the mother of all fun action movies.

The Giant Robot Challenge: US throws down the gauntlet, Japan accepts

I've mellowed as I've aged.  Now all I want is a quiet evening, reasonably priced cocktails, sleepy dogs and robot fights.

I am not talking about your little BattleBots or whatever...  If I wanted to see remote controlled cars running over each other, I'd hang out in a hobby shop on Saturdays.

People, we live in age of unparalleled wonders, and as I progress through my 40th year, I am now satisfied to know that, before I slip off the mortal coil, it is looking increasingly likely that I will see two multi-ton robots beat the scrap out of each other.

Cry havoc and let slip loose the bots of war!

TL;DR: Finally Reading Marvel's "Infinity", event comics and the DC-ification of the Marvel Universe

It took me a really long time to make it through Marvel's Infinity collection of Avengers stories.  There was no "Trade 2" of New Avengers, so in order to keep up, I had to buy a huge, expensive trade with a mix of Avengers comics that I wasn't reading.

Back in Arizona, I remember seeing the recipe for a "Kool-Aid Pie" and, more or less based on the name, I went ahead and decided I must try it out.

I hadn't ever done much baking, or made a pie, but I bought the ingredients, all of which looked like ingredients I should probably have for a pie.  A crust. Sugar.  Dehydrated milk, I think.  Then I got out the mixer and whatnot, and maybe 1/3rd of the way through the process of making the pie, I re-read the recipe and realized - "oh, I'm just whipping up sugar and Kool-Aid and putting it in a pie-crust".  It was literally an inedible pie.  It would have looked neat and cool sitting there all purple, but there was nothing really there.  No pie in my pie, just- purpleish whipped sugar.  Not even the basics of an actual pie, just something you would throw in a movie, I guess.

That's kind of Marvel's Infinity.  It seems like it should be a story.  It seems like it's going somewhere, but it was sort of a hand-waving illusion to get you to next, more expensive event, and all of this was some laborious and unnecessary Kool-Aid pie.

oh, yeeeeaahhhhhhh....!!!!

To be blunt -