An evening pause: The central sequence from the 1979 movie, The Black Stallion, when the shipwrecked boy Alec succeeds in taming the shipwrecked Arabian horse. The combination of Carmine Coppola’s music and Caleb Deschanel’s photography in this sequence is unmatched.
An evening pause: I do believe the grasshopper sings the national anthem of the modern liberal, at the beginning of this cartoon from 1934.
An evening pause: From the movie A Mighty Wind (2003), a wonderful and funny pseudo documentary about the 1960s folk era. The folk team of Mitch & Mickey never existed, but this song is superb, made even more poignant by the story.
An evening pause: As today is the Ides of March, I am always reminded of Julius Caesar. With that thought in mind, here is a clip from the 1953 movie, Cleopatra, staring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. The movie overall isn’t very good, though the first half with Rex Harrison playing Julius Caesar is worth watching, partly because of Harrison and partly because it is very clearly inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra.
That first half also includes the scene below, when Cleopatra enters Rome, bringing with her her son by Caesar. A more classic example of late Hollywood spectacle would be hard to find. It is silly, absurd, impossible, and yet totally engrossing. And it was done with no computer effects. When Hollywood PR used to say a movie had a “cast of thousands,” they really meant it.
One of the many reasons I am no longer in the movie business.
R.I.P. Davy Jones, 66, of the Monkees has died.
An evening pause: From Mel Brooks’ classic film, The Producers (1968), a good description of how our modern government functions.
The top ten ways Hollywood can win its audience back.
As someone who spent almost twenty years in the movie business, I think Nolte hits the nail on the head. I also think Hollywood will not do any of the things he suggests, mostly because it would require them to abandon their elite, leftwing ideology that for the past thirty years has become the only thing too many Hollywood people care about.
Tarzan’s chimp co-star Cheetah has died at his Florida sanctuary.
An evening pause: The same song, two versions, from the 1962 movie, and then from the 2003 television production.
Five ridiculous gun myths promoted by movies. I like this one:
It’s an old joke by now that nobody runs out of bullets in action movies (unless it’s suddenly convenient to the plot, that is). Hollywood shows some restraint with revolvers–usually no more than 10 or 11 shots per six-shot cylinder–but damn, do they go hog-wild with anything that fires full-auto. So much so that that most of us have wound up with an utterly ridiculous concept of how those guns work. They’re seriously depicting these things firing a hundred times more bullets than they can actually hold.
An evening pause: On the anniversary of the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor: “I bet they are asleep in New York. I bet they’re asleep all over America.” From Casablanca (1942).
An evening pause: On the anniversary of its first presentation, Charles Laughton gives his interpretation, from the movie Ruggles of Red Gap (1935).
An evening pause: In honor of this Armistice Day, the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year: Montgomery Clift plays revelry, from the 1953 classic movie, From Here to Eternity.
An evening pause: Once again, for Halloween, this short but truly unnerving scene from Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), based on the story by Shirley Jackson. Captures what everyone imagines it would be like to sleep in a haunted house. And with no special effects at all.
Using Hubble Space Telescope images taken over a 14 year period, a team of astronomers led by Patrick Hartigan of Rice University have produced six very short time-lapse movies, showing the changes that have occurred to a variety of interstellar jets and bow shocks over time. The one below is my favorite. They are all worth looking at, as they illustrate forcefully how the changeless heavens are not so changeless.
