Living in a Media World

In December of 2020, when it became clear we were not going to be returning to normal life any time soon, we purchased a big honking 55-inch 4K TV and settled in for a year of watching movies at home. By Dec. 31, 2021, we had watched 236 movies either together or separately. This is one of series of blog posts about those films.

Kiss Me Kate (1953), directed by George Sidney and staring Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel and the legendary Ann Miller. (Miller is a legend both for her great dancing and for the line in Rocky Horror Picture Show where Columbia does a bit of tap and then yells, “Eat your heart out, Ann Miller!“)

It’s a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew with a framing story of the leads being divorced but working together on a musical staging of Shrew. The show is pretty badly dated (The movie poster features Keel spanking Grayson), but the dancing by Ann Miller and a very young Bob Fosse is fantastic, as is the music by Cole Porter.

Kong Skull Island (2017), directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts; starring Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, and John C. Reilly. This is the second film in the Legendary Picture’s MonsterVerse that has brought back Godzilla, King Kong, Mothra, and others in a modern series based on classic monster movies. This one is set primarily in the early 1970s with Jackson playing a an army commander leading an expedition to collect … well, you know who. Aside from giving the movie the look of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the script has several nods to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, which Apocalypse Now was loosely based on. Character names include James Conrad (a reference to the author) and Hank Marlow (reference to the narrator of Darkness.) This was a re-watch for me, having seen it in theaters when it first came out. (We’ll be back to the series before 2021 is out…)

Rewatching Skull Island, got me thinking again about Apocalypse Now and its troubled shoot. So I used this as an opportunity to re-watch Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness  about the disastrous production of an amazing film. (I know, the film is actually directed by Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, and Eleanor Coppola, but I still think of it has her film.)

If after watching this you still want more about the production of Apocalypse Now, I would also highly recommend the audio book version of Along The Way,  narrated by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. While the primary focus of the book is about the father and son filming The Way, it deals extensively with the time the two spent together while Sheen was filming AN.)

And finally, we dip back into the old movie catalog with a screening of The Woman in Green (1945), one of a series of Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies from the 1940s. My late mum-in-law was a big fan of these films, so when we stumbled across it on Amazon Prime, we had to take a look.

Coming up next – A mixed bag of action and comedy films from the 1940s to 1980s.

In December of 2020, when it became clear we were not going to be returning to normal life any time soon, we purchased a big honking 55-inch 4K TV and settled in for a year of watching movies at home. By Dec. 31, 2021, we had watched 236 movies either together or separately. This is one of series of blog posts about those films.

I sometimes have to stretch to have a theme to connect the movies together that I’m going to talk about, but this batch was pretty easy to bring together under the banner of numeric titles – in fact, these could all sound like they came together in an episode of the rather strange and wonderful TV series LOST. (Remember 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 & 42?)

We watched these movies in reverse chronological order but forward numerical order. So enough of this nonsense – let’s look at the movies.

Ocean’s 8 is the fourth movie in the Ocean’s “trilogy“…

Hold on a minute before we go any further. There was never an “Ocean’s 11 Trilogy.” Just having three films in a series does not make it a trilogy – It just means that the first two movies in the series were successful enough to lead to a third movie. Now, obviously – Lord of the Rings was a trilogy — A connected series of three films that told a coherent story. The Hobbit was a bad collection of three movies that tried to tell a mostly coherent story – it too was a trilogy. What really drives me crazy is after labeling a three-movie series as a trilogy, the filmmakers go back and make a fourth movie in the series, which simply makes them all… a series.

Ok, where were we, oh yes, Ocean’s 8  (2018) is the fourth movie in a fun heist series originally anchored by George Clooney as the freshly released-from-prison Danny Ocean who wants to rob a casino. O8 takes the premise that Sandra Bullock plays Danny’s sister Debbie, who has just been released from prison and wants to… Yeah, you get the picture.

Only this time it’s told with an all-female core cast of Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Awkwafina, Rihanna, and Helena Bonham Carter. The film tells a really familiar story but with this all-star cast of incredibly talented women performers, it’s an absolute hoot. It’s not about originality, it’s about all the fun we have getting to the end of the story.

Ten Little Indians (1965/66) is an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None directed by George Pollock that includes teen heartthrob Fabian in the cast. This is one of five movie and television adaptations of the novel, along with one stage version, in which the guests at a remote house are killed, one by one. It’s a fun movie with a runtime of under 90 minutes for those who are Christie (or Fabian) fans.

I think that movies with a runtime under an hour-and-a-half are a whole genre to themselves. There’s a lot to be said for telling mystery/thriller story quickly, without any excess. Among my favorites in this category are the original Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell, the German thriller Run Lola Run that manages to tell the same story three times in 80 minutes, and the American shark thriller The Shallows.

The 39 Steps (1935), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is an early thriller by Hitch (who is likely the most viewed director for us during 2021) that tells the story of an ordinary man getting caught up in an elaborate plot to steal British intelligence secrets by a shadowy group known as the 39 Steps. This movie has all the elements we have come to expect in a Hitchcock thriller – the everyman caught up in extraordinary events, a mysterious McGuffin that everyone seems to want, and a cameo by the director that fans watch for carefully.

Coming Attractions: A Shakespearean musical, King Kong meets Apocalypse Now, and a classic detective story.