Moonspinners (1964)

This Disney movie is based on a book by Mary Stewart.  Stewart is a good writer and I’ve enjoyed other of her suspense novels such as Thunder on the Right and This Rough Magic.

Teenaged Nikki (Hayley Mills) and her Aunt Francis (Joan Greenwood) are visiting Greece one summer, and stop in an isolated hotel, named the Moon-Spinners.  They are given an inhospitable greeting by the innkeeper and her brother but this does not deter them.   Nikki spies a young man named Mark and promptly falls into a crush with him.  But all is not well, as the innkeeper and her brother have secrets.

I was thoroughly disappointed by this movie, and parts of it annoyed me.

For example, the townspeople are celebrating a wedding with a traditional dance. Then Nikki and Mark decide to enliven the party with the most graceless version of the twist I have ever seen.

I like Hayley Mills in the Parent Trap, Pollyanna, and so on. Nevertheless…

Somebody really had it in for the poor woman because neither her costumes, makeup, nor the lighting is flattering to her. If that weren’t enough, she does this cringe-worthy screaming and crying and flopping about whenever anything happens. 

People in these categories should not watch this movie: Mary Stewart fans, Hayley Mills fans, mystery fans, or fans of well-paced movies with credible characters.

Everybody else is encouraged to try it.

Child that Books Built

I’m reading The Child that Books Built: A life in reading by Francis Spufford.

He begins the book by describing his addiction to stories and to reading. He was astonished that although Smaug, the dragon in The Hobbit, hurtled through his mind, it didn’t show to outsiders. He would sneak into bookstores and read books bit by bit and walk out carefully, full of the latest story:

“Other people can’t see what so permeates me, I accept that, but why can’t they? It fills me. The imbalance between what’s felt and what shows means I carry the sensory load of fiction like a secret….while I’m still freshly distended with my cargo of images, while I’m a fish tank with a new shoal in me, with one aspect of myself I enjoy the power of being different behind my unbetraying face. If I hung about stoned in front of a police station, solemn on the outside and spiraling chemically within…I wouldn’t be getting a different buzz.”

Books don’t mesermize me like this anymore. But I remember it. I remember inhabiting a story so intensely that the Smaugs of my books seemed in danger of breaking into the real world at moment.

my amphibious love

What Were They Thinking? – a blog about odd moments in old comic books – posted this excerpt from Wonder Woman.

Just because it made me smile. 

search terms housekeeping

I admit that I’ve long been envious of blog authors who list their weird search terms.  They always have cool ones like “mustard saint of Nebraska.”

Mostly I have people searching for information on manga and people looking for the falling sand game.  I’m a bit surprised about the game because it’s easy to find.  Some people are working on book reports.

There is a magazine about travel called the Jaunt which gets mixed up with my daydream magazine Josei Jaunt.  Lots of people are looking for Tatsuya Ishida, which is all to the good.  Go Sinfest!

I got one for the “dire eels“ post. 

I hope to one day get a “ducks with mufflers dancing the tarantella.”

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

A barefoot woman (Chloris Leachman), dressed only in a raincoat, runs down a highway, looking behind her, and trying to hitchhike.  She stops (Ralph Meeker) Mike Hammer’s car by standing in the middle of the road. 

Once in the car, she tells him three things: he’s selfish, her name is Christina, and not to forget her.  Immediately afterward, they are run off road.

Mike is only conscious enough to know they are in terrible danger but not conscious enough to even see who the villain in charge is.  Christiana is being tortured and I felt it was upsetting though you don’t see anything.

Mike wakes up in a hospital bed with a lot of questions.  Everyone tells him to back off the case but he doesn’t.

I thought this film noir was very stylish and it kept my attention.  Everywhere Mike went, some dame was after him.  There seemed to be no shortage of sexually aggressive women.

There seemed to be a running theme of art in the movie.  Classical music, opera, Victorian poetry, paintings, etc.

It is worth watching.

FilmFanatic.org review.

Galatea, Interactive Fiction

Here is a good article on the history of Interactive Fiction .  Briefly IF games were the precursor to consule type of games.  With IF, you would read text and type in commands to your character and try to solve puzzles.  There were few pictures or sounds.

Eventually, IF dropped out of fashion but some die-hards continued to refine them.  They have developed into sophisticated interactive games.

Galatea the IF game is an amazing experience.  Emily Short created it.  I think she must be amazing too.

Here’s the set up.  You are a critic going to view an android with surperb artificial intelligence.  Her name is Galatea.

You might know the Greco-Roman myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who scorned all women.  He created a statue of a beautiful woman which he named Galatea. He fell in love with the marble statue and dressed it and offered it gifts. Finally, he prayed to Venus to make Galatea alive and she did.

Back to the game, you can use certain commands such as ASK, READ, TOUCH, THINK ABOUT.  Every choice you make gives you a different ending and a different insight.  There is no right or wrong way to do it. 

I love this game and Galatea seems eerily responsive at times.  I’d think I was in a chat room talking to a real person except that she can spell.

5 book challenge – setback

I just couldn’t get engaged by John Saul’s Perfect Nightmare. I mean after the first 3 or 4 chapters, I skimmed. I found out the bad guy was and why he kidnapped the teenage girls.

Saul writes well and I think I am not the right person for the book. Perhaps the torture stuff was too much for me. Dunno.

Those Who Hunt the Night is next on my list, about vampires in Victorian England which should be entertaining.

Also, I’ve decided to substitute Saul’s books with Graham Joyce’s Tooth Fairy. That one had a lot of good reviews. I think it’s about an evil sprite who haunts this boy. The premise reminds me of Theodore Sturgeon’s “Professor’s Teddy Bear.” That is a freaky story.

1950s movies – top 25

This list is taken from Digital Dream Door’s list of 100 best movies from the 1950s. These are only the first 25.

Here are my other top 25 lists:

Silent :: 1930s :: 1940s :: 1950s :: 1960s :: 1970s :: 1980s :: 1990s :: 2000s

Underlined means I’ve seen it. Blue text means I haven’t. A ♣ means I want to see it.

1. Seven Samurai – (1954, Akira Kurosawa)♣

2. On the Waterfront – (1954, Elia Kazan)

3. Vertigo – (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)

4. The Bridge on the River Kwai – (1957, David Lean)

5. The Seventh Seal -(1957, Ingmar Bergman)♣

6. Sunset Boulevard – (1950, Billy Wilder)

7. Rear Window – (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)

8. Rashomon – (1951, Akira Kurosawa)

9. All About Eve – (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)♣

10. Singin’ in the Rain – (1952, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly)

11. Some Like It Hot – (1959, Billy Wilder)

12. North by Northwest – (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)

13. Tokyo Story – (1953, Yasujiro Ozu)

14. Touch of Evil – (1958, Orson Welles)

15. A Streetcar Named Desire – (1951, Elia Kazan)

16. Diabolique – (1954, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

17. Rebel Without a Cause – (1955, Nicholas Ray)

18. The African Queen – (1951, John Huston)

19. 12 Angry Men – (1957, Sidney Lumet)

20. La Strada – (1954, Federico Fellini)

21. Ben-Hur – (1959, William Wyler)

22. Wild Strawberries – (1957, Ingmar Bergman)

23. The Searchers – (1956, John Ford)

24. High Noon – (1952, Fred Zinnemann)

25. The Night of the Hunter – (1955, Charles Laughton)♣

random account of a traffic accident

I was walking home yesterday a little after 5PM, and I was moping about what a bad day I had had. 

I heard a big crunching sound behind me.

I turned around and saw that 3 cars had had an accident a couple of feet from me.  I hesitated on the street to see if everything was OK.  The three drivers got out of their cars and started examining the damage.  The fronts and sides of their cars were crumpled and there was glass all over the street.

I think what happened was the first car was driving the wrong way down a one-way street.  The second car tried to stop rather than run into him.  The third car rear-ended the second car.  But I can’t be sure as I had my back turned, and the cars were scattered across the intersection when I looked back.

My cell phone was in my apartment across the street, so I decided to cross it and get it. But the three men who live next door were hurrying towards the wreck, one holding a cell phone aloft.  The cell phone guy shouted across the traffic to me (none of the other cars stopped or really slowed down – they just drove around the three cars):  “I hear cars squealing all day long.  This is the first wreck though.”

I shouted back, “It seems pretty bad.”

The three men rushed to the drivers at the intersection.  At that moment, an emergency vehicle happened to drive by.  Well, it is a main intersection for that part of town.  The man driving it stopped and started talking to the drivers.  He went to the back of his vehicle and made a call.

I felt like things were about as under control as they could be and decided to simply go home.  The problem was that people were making, um, creative decisions about driving (since it was about 5:30PM and busy), and I felt that it was a bit risky to cross in the middle of the street.

At this point, two police cars came up with blazing lights and sirens.  One attended to the wreck and the other directed traffic at the intersection and eventually blocked it altogether.

Another police car and an ambulance arrived as well.  One of the policemen began directing the creative drivers.  I walked a bit further and crossed at quieter part of the street. 

Then I discovered that the new policeman was diverting traffic behind my house too.  But as I finally reached my door, I noted that the ambulance was leaving.  It didn’t seem to be in a hurry so I hope that means no one was hurt.

The whole thing took about 2-3 hours to settle down to normal.

FBI agents – a joke

This has long been one of my favorite jokes.  Maybe it is true that FBI agents have no sense of humor that they are aware of.  But apparently it’s not just a joke: it’s real.

FBI agent joke via Snopes.com