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george-stachnik
Reviews
Moby Dick (1956)
Widescreen or Not?
This has long been a favorite of mine, but I have a question about the aspect ratio of this film. IMDb's "Technical Specs" page for Moby Dick lists *two* different aspect ratios: 1.37:1 (DVD release) and 1.66 : 1.
Now - we all know that many films that were originally shot in widescreen (1.66:1) were then cropped to 1.37:1 for television. For many years, I searched for a widescreen version of "Moby Dick" on DVD or Blu-Ray. I had all but given up, when a user review of "Moby Dick" appeared on TCMDB which claimed that a widescreen DVD *had* been released in Europe (PAL & region 9). Another reviewer on the same page claimed to have seen the film in widescreen on TCM.
A search of TCM's website turned up four clips from this film - and sure enough, they're in widescreen. At least one of these clips (Fr. Mapple's sermon) is also available on youtube - BUT - the youtube clip is *not* in widescreen; it appears to be have been copied from the DVD. If you compare them, you'll find something very strange.
Normally, "pan-and-scan" DVDs are produced by cropping out the left and right sides of the original widescreen images. But in the case of Moby Dick, it appears that the opposite has been done - the widescreen images were produced by cropping out the top and bottom of the 1.37-1 images. In other words, it appears that Moby Dick was originally shot in 1.37:1, and then cropped to create a widescreen version which has never been released on DVD (at least not in the US).
Can anybody shed any more light on the original aspect ratio for this movie? Is there really a widescreen version of this film? And if so, does it contain more information than the DVD version? Or less?
(The TCM reviews that I referenced are here: http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/17660/Moby-Dick/user-reviews.html TCM's widescreen clips here here: http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/17660/Moby-Dick/videos.html and the youtube clip of Fr. Mapple's sermon is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rWV8sBZ9ho)
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Followup: Amazon is selling an imported Blu-Ray which claims to contain the widescreen version of the 1956 version of Moby Dick. There are a bunch of screen shots from the BluRay on "home theater forum.com" (see note below). I compared those screen shots with similar images from the DVD (which is in the old academy ratio). Sure enough, the widescreen images on the Blu-Ray appear to have been created by cropping the top-and-bottom off of the DVD images. ("Tilt-and-scan" instead of "Pan-and-Scan").
For some reason, IMDb won't let me post the name of the website with the Blu-Ray screen shots. They say "it's a very long word, which is not allowed". If you want to see the screen shots, paste the link below into your browser, delete the spaces from "home theater forum" so that it's all one word - then hit "enter".
www.home theater forum.com/topic/332782-moby-dick-1956/
Cloverfield (2008)
Oh how the movies have changed. Or maybe we've changed. Maybe both
Hollywood has spent the last 20 years mining the pop culture of the baby boom generation. We boomers grew up watching "Flash Gordon" serials on TV, and so George Lucas gave us "Star Wars" providing my aging generation with a chance to re-visit the collective innocence of our youth, while providing younger viewers with an opportunity to discover theirs.
But Hollywood seems to have decided that what film-goers want is a darker experience, even as they continue to sift through the childhood memories of fifty-somethings like myself. My memories of the Batman comic books of the 1950s and 60s bear little resemblance to the trip down psychosis-lane that the upcoming "Dark Knight" promises to be. And now monster movies are the latest film genre to fall victim to Hollywood's need to screw around with things that are better left alone.
Demonstrating yet again that there's nothing new under the sun, (or if there is, the suits in Hollywood won't invest in it), Cloverfield is the red-headed stepchild of the monster movies that we boomers used to watch at Saturday Matinees. Its antecedents include everything from "Them", to the "Godzilla" franchise. But what's interesting is not what "Cloverfield" has in common with these films it's how it differs.
Monster movies are, at their core, films about crisis management. Traditionally, they begin with a revelation that the normal balance of nature has been upset. The monster is the antagonist of these films, representing mother nature aroused by something that we pesky humans have been doing, whether its exploding nuclear weapons (as in "Them", "Godzilla" and a host of others), or messing around with DNA, (as in "Jurassic Park").
The fundamental purpose of a monster movie is to reassure the audience that no matter how bad things get, Science, God and the US Military will prevail. The protagonists were often scientists (as in "Them") and all the characters (except for the villains) were fundamentally good people. They were willing to sacrifice everything even themselves in order to set the balance of nature right again, either by destroying the monster, (as in the first Godzilla movie) or by learning to live with it (see the rest of the Godzilla franchise).
Much has been made of Cloverfield's use of hand-held cameras, (what Roger Ebert calls "Queasy-Cam") and its refusal to observe "film grammar". I think it was Richard Roeper who observed, "Never has so much money been spent on making a movie look like crap." But in the end, these are just stylistic devices that were done more effectively in The Blair Witch Project.
The thing that really sets Cloverfield apart from other giant monster movies is not the way it looks - but the fact that its plot breaks virtually every one of the rules of the monster movie genre.
***SPOILERS AHEAD!****
Cloverfield is, at its core, a pretty nihilistic exercise. It's not about managing crises so much as it is about being overwhelmed by them. It begins with a group of young people who are celebrating the fact that one of them is leaving (how self-absorbed is that?). When the monster attacks, nobody in the movie has any idea what it is, where it came from, or why it's here. When the film's hero (Michael Stahl-David) discovers that a girl whom he slept with the night before is trapped in the wreckage of her apartment building, his friends try to discourage him from rescuing her (so much for self-sacrifice). In the end, he frees her, but the two of them die anyway, along with everybody else, (including, apparently, but not necessarily, the monster).
The message at the heart of traditional monster movies is "Humanity can survive anything, even giant lizards.", But the message of Cloverfield seems to be, "Life is pointless, and at the end we are all going to die anyway, so why bother?" Somebody should tell director Matt Reeves that if he wants to make a film about Nihilism, he doesn't need to spend $300 Million. "Fight Club" was a much better movie, and it was shot for under a third of Cloverfield's estimated budget.
And while we're on the subject of old monster movies, has anybody watched "Them" lately? Now there's a monster movie that's begging to be re-made. The script and dialog are so great that not even incredibly cheesy special effects could spoil them ("Make me a sergeant and charge the booze!" is one of my favorite lines from a movie). But please keep it away from directors like Matt Reeves, or the ants will win and in the end, the scientists will be performing horrible experiments on the little girl.
Personally, I am looking forward to a sequel. What do you think we'll get first, "Cloverfield the Musical"? Or maybe "Cloverfield on Ice"?
C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004)
In Defense of CSA
Many others have criticized this film (fairly, I think) for its acting (which is amateur quality), and for its low-budget appearance. But the most virulent criticism here has been about CSA's "accuracy". CSA purports to be a television broadcast of a British documentary. This film-within-a-film traces the history of America during the century and a half since the American Civil War - a war which, in this alternate universe, the Union Army lost.
This pseudo-documentary has the victorious Confederacy annexing the north at the conclusion of the war. Critics have pointed out that in reality the south had no interest in the north - it only wanted to secede from the Union, not conquer it. They complain that the slave-based economy of the confederacy was unsustainable, and they characterize CSA's premise that slavery would have survived through the 20th century as "lies"...
These complaints are all valid, but is it fair to to criticize CSA because of the inaccuracies of its film-within-a-film? It's easy to pick CSA apart for its poor historical scholarship, but that's like criticizing "Hamlet" because "The Murder of Gonzago" is poorly written (which it is) or criticizing "300" for getting the battle of Thermopylae all wrong.
CSA is really much more about its bogus TV commercials than it is about history - or even pseudo-history. The ads ask us to imagine what the Home Shopping Network would be like if it sold slaves (er, "servants") instead of costume jewelry. They ask us how we might market "Lowjack"-like devices to secure our personal property if that property happened to include human beings.
CSA is not a documentary. It's a comedy *about* a documentary. It's not interested in historical truth, or even in the historical likelihood of its premise. It's much more interested in poking fun at a hypothetical Confederate States of America - a fictional land in which racism has not only been allowed to flourish, it's at the heart of the economy.
CSA is not a great movie. The writing is sophomoric, (the scene with Lincoln in black-face is truly awful) and the acting is marginal at best. As for whether or not it's funny, I suppose that depends on who you are. Personally, I think the Colbert Report is hilarious, but I suspect that many folks who watch Fox News would disagree. Many of CSA's most virulent critics here have identified themselves as southerners. And southerners would have every right to be offended by the portrait that CSA paints of the south - except for the fact that the movie is not about the south.
CSA is about a fictional place that depends on the racism of its people to sustain itself. And I would hate to live in a place like that. Wouldn't you?
The Sign of the Cross (1932)
There's more here than meets the eye...
I watched Sign of the Cross last night with my church's Bible Study group. This was the third time I've seen this film. It's an interesting movie, if not a great one, but I think it's one of DeMille's most underrated works. There's a lot more to it than first meets the eye.
The first thing that surprised me was how long it took for this movie to get rolling. Film-makers of this period liked to let audiences get to know their characters before beginning to rev up the plot. The classic example of this is the 1933 version of King Kong, in which the big monkey doesn't even appear until the third reel.
********* WARNING - SPOILERS FOLLOW **************
The whole first half of the 125-minute "Sign of the Cross" is relatively uneventful, particularly for contemporary audiences that are used to having movies start off with a bang. DeMille uses the first hour to set up a love story between a powerful Roman Prefect named Marcus Superbus (played by Frederic March, who must have had a difficult time keeping a straight face with that name) and an innocent young Christian girl named Mercia (played by Elissa Landi).
When they first meet, March is in lust more than in love. He clearly can have any woman in Rome that he wants, including the Emperor's Wife (Claudette Colbert). When he first meets Landi he tries to seduce her. When that doesn't work, he tries to demonstrate his affection for her by convincing one of "Rome's most... er, Talented Women" to seduce her for him, leading to a lesbian dance sequence that drove the censors crazy in 1932. Meanwhile, Landi develops what can best be described as a schoolgirl crush on March. Landi claims to love March, and flirts with him, but then draws away.
The first half of the film focuses on these 2-dimensional characters, and the shallow attraction that they have for one other. But their feelings deepen during the second half. When Landi's Christian friends are marched off to the arena to die, she finds herself wanting to do nothing more than join them. March realizes that he loves her, and sacrifices his career by demanding that the emperor (Charles Laughton in his American film debut) spare her life. Laughton agrees, but only if she renounces her faith.
March goes to the Coliseum just as she's about to be sacrificed to the lions. He tells her that she can continue to practice Christianity privately if he marries her - she only has to pretend to renounce it publicly. It's a tempting offer, but she refuses.
So March, who does not believe in Christianity, and apparently knows next to nothing about it, does something astonishing. He says that *he* will convert - not because he believes in it - but because he cannot imagine living without her. The film ends with the two of them hand in hand climbing the stairs to meet the lions and their maker.
On the surface, this seems to be a satisfying ending. The largely-Christian audience for whom the film was made would have cheered an ending with March converting to Christianity and dying for his faith.
But that's not exactly what's happening here.
Suppose March had converted to Christianity before deciding to die for it (as Richard Burton would do 20 years later in "The Robe"). Then it would be easy to cheer as the two of them marched into the arena to die. But in Sign of the Cross, March agrees to sacrifice his life mostly because of his love for Landi, not Jesus. He accepts Christianity to please her, not because of of any spiritual awakening.
Sign of the Cross was marketed as a religious movie. But what DeMille delivered was something else. Landi's faith not only inevitably leads to her martyrdom, it also consumes March because he had the bad luck to fall in love with a Christian. DeMille almost seems to be suggesting that Christianity in those days demanded death from its followers, and from their loved ones, and would not be satisfied with less. This film is hardly a flattering portrait of early Christianity. (Christian readers please hold your email - I'm not espousing this point of view - I'm merely pointing out that it is there in this movie. If you feel the need to respond to these comments, please do so by praying for me, not by writing to me; I promise I'll be grateful.)
And speaking of the audience, pay attention to the way DeMille uses the camera during the infamous arena sequences. He's not the least bit squeamish about putting the horror, blood and guts of the Coliseum on the screen, given the limits of his budget and 1930's special effects. But he continually returns his camera to the arena audience. Their reaction to the spectacle ranges from boredom to excitement to sexual arousal.
It's a powerful indictment of both audiences - the ones who are watching from the brightly lit benches of the Roman Coliseum, and those of us who are watching from more comfortable seats in the dark.