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mousmeIt's June! That means I'm going to write every day based on a topic of your choice. Not all the dates have been picked up yet, so don't let ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sorceror have all the fun! ;)
Todaysorceror asked me to talk about classic film, since it's Marilyn Monroe's birthday. Before I get into it, I have to point out that I am in no way, shape or form an expert on film in any way. In fact, I don't even qualify as an amateur enthusiast. I just like watching movies, and some of those include classic film.
Since it's Marilyn Monroe's birthday, I should start by admitting publicly that I haven't seen many of her movies. In fact, the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Some Like It Hot. A quick glance at IMdB tells me that I have, in fact, only seen that one movie. I'd started watching The Seven-Year Itch with an ex-girlfriend, but we turned it off about halfway through, because it just hasn't aged well at all. I watched Some Like It Hot with my father when I was, oh, about ten or eleven, if memory served. I remember laughing really hard, and quite enjoying watching men struggle with all the "typical" problems of being a woman, including having to put on the ten pounds of make-up that women were expected to wear in order to look presentable, and worrying about whether the seam on their stockings was straight. Yes, I am old enough to remember worrying about seams on stockings, even though I never personally had that particular problem. The phrase "Wait! Wait for sugar!" became a household joke after we watched that movie. It was cute and sweet, and probably a lot of the more adult implications sailed right over my head.
It was also a surprisingly progressive movie in some ways. Check out the final scene:
This was 1959. While that scene is definitely being played for laughs, it's obvious that Osgood is not at all phased by the notion of marrying a man who's dressed as a woman or even wants to be a woman. Can't have children? We'll adopt. Don't fit into my mother's wedding dress? We'll get it altered. Osgood, for all he's portrayed as a simpleton, is probably the most open-minded character in the whole movie. It's sweet, really.
So that's the sum total of my experience with Marilyn Monroe movies.
My father is the main reason I've watched as many classic movies as I have, since he's firmly of the opinion that no good movies have been made since 1960 or thereabouts (I exaggerate only slightly). We finally graduated to a colour TV when I was about five years old, after I had run to him with my two best friends in tow to settle an argument between us. They had come over and were shocked that Big Bird was white, when he was supposed to be yellow. There had ensued a hotly debated argument because, as far as I was concerned, Big Bird had always been white, and what the heck were they talking about? My father then sheepishly explained to me that we had an older television set that only showed black and white, but that in reality Big Bird was, in fact yellow. That prompted him to upgrade to a colour set, and while he was at it he bought a VHS player.
We'd watched a few movies at home before, when he'd borrowed a portable reel projector from the office. I remember sitting on the living room floor while he and my mother took down the paintings and other art from one wall, and hearing the click-click-whirr of the film reels while I watched the image flicker on the wall. It was incredibly exciting to be able to watch a movie at home like that, and that was how I watched Bambi and Peter and the Wolf and The Red Balloon (which made me cry so hard at the end I almost had hysterics and had to be carried out of the room). But those were incredibly special occasions, and my parents made a really big deal out of it.
The VCR changed our lives, because my father started taping everything off the TV. He would scour the newspaper and eventually the TV guide for movies that he either knew he liked or that I liked or that he thought we should watch. He learned how to program the VCR to record at specific times, and showed me how to use it too, when I was a little older. That was how I got to watch all my first Disney movies (Dumbo, Robin Hood, Pinocchio, The Jungle Book, and a few other cartoons that were not Disney, like Gulliver's Travels, and The Secret of NIMH). Oddly enough we seldom used it to tape TV shows, except for a British miniseries on PBS very loosely based on Black Beauty. The concept of re-watching a TV show remained rather alien to me until the introduction of DVDs, and even then not until the mid-2000's when TV show prices became somewhat more accessible to me (I had a regular job with a salary by then). We did use the VCR to tape pretty much every movie that ever aired on television, though. It's how I watched the Star Wars trilogy, how I watched most of the Indiana Jones trilogy (though the third one came out on the big screen when I was about ten, and so both my parents and I went to see it in theatres), and countless other movies.
So it was thanks to my father that I got introduced to many different types of film, from a pretty early age.
Under his guidance I watched a ton of Humphrey Bogart, who remains to this day one of my favourites, overshadowed only by Lauren Bacall. ("You do know how to whistle, don't you Steve? You just put your lips together... and blow." By the way, the implications of that also sailed right over my head until I was much, much older.) I have watched To Have and Have Not more times than I can count, and probably more times than I watched some Disney movies as a child, which is saying quite a bit. "Say... was you ever bit by a dead bee?" was also a family joke for quite some time.
I know a lot of people dislike Casablanca, and all I have to say about those people is that they are wrong. ;) Okay, more seriously, I don't understand how people can confuse a slow-paced, atmospheric movie with one that is "boring." Casablanca is rife with tension from beginning to end, tightly written and beautifully paced. Sure, there aren't any explosions or chases and there isn't much by way of violence, but that doesn't mean there's no conflict, by any means. While To Have and Have Not will always be my first love, I can't deny that Casablanca is by far the better movie (with TH&HN coming afterward and having a fairly similar plot, even though it was supposedly based on a short story by Hemingway).
A little-known movie with Bogart, or at least a movie that none of my friends seem to know, is one called The Enforcer. My father discovered this while he was away on one of his numerous trips abroad, flicking through the channels, and happened upon it. He loved it, knew I would love it, and taped it off the TV when he got home (I don't know what serendipitous timing intervened on our behalf, but I am grateful for it). It's a great noir film, tightly scripted and incredibly tense. It starts with the sole witness who can put a crime boss in jail committing suicide rather than testifying in court. The crime boss is a clever, scheming man who has put together a ring of murderers-for-hire and who never gets his hands dirty... except for the first job he ever did. It turns out there was a second witness, though, who would have been a child at the time, and now the race is on to find this little girl (now grown up) before the gang does.
In short, it's a really good movie, and if you like hard-boiled noir detective stuff, then this is just the ticket for you.
Writing this post is making me want to go back and watch all those movies I loved as a child and a teenager. I haven't watched Doctor Zhivago in years, for instance. There's a long list of classics I haven't watched either, which I would love to get to. I keep telling myself that I should make a point of watching films outside the North American/Western European sphere, too. I've seen a few Eastern European movies in my lifetime, but as a rule film from other countries isn't on my radar. I used to watch more of them when I would go to the Montreal Film Festival, but I haven't been to that in... uh... *cringe* nearly a decade. I'll have to look into fixing that. To be fair, I don't watch many movies at all these days. My attention span seems well-suited to television shows and the occasional Marvel movie, and that's about it. Perhaps when things get a little less crazy I'll have a movie night once a week in which I'll challenge myself to watch things outside my comfort zone.
This has been a post.
sorceror have all the fun! ;)Today
sorceror asked me to talk about classic film, since it's Marilyn Monroe's birthday. Before I get into it, I have to point out that I am in no way, shape or form an expert on film in any way. In fact, I don't even qualify as an amateur enthusiast. I just like watching movies, and some of those include classic film.Since it's Marilyn Monroe's birthday, I should start by admitting publicly that I haven't seen many of her movies. In fact, the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Some Like It Hot. A quick glance at IMdB tells me that I have, in fact, only seen that one movie. I'd started watching The Seven-Year Itch with an ex-girlfriend, but we turned it off about halfway through, because it just hasn't aged well at all. I watched Some Like It Hot with my father when I was, oh, about ten or eleven, if memory served. I remember laughing really hard, and quite enjoying watching men struggle with all the "typical" problems of being a woman, including having to put on the ten pounds of make-up that women were expected to wear in order to look presentable, and worrying about whether the seam on their stockings was straight. Yes, I am old enough to remember worrying about seams on stockings, even though I never personally had that particular problem. The phrase "Wait! Wait for sugar!" became a household joke after we watched that movie. It was cute and sweet, and probably a lot of the more adult implications sailed right over my head.
It was also a surprisingly progressive movie in some ways. Check out the final scene:
This was 1959. While that scene is definitely being played for laughs, it's obvious that Osgood is not at all phased by the notion of marrying a man who's dressed as a woman or even wants to be a woman. Can't have children? We'll adopt. Don't fit into my mother's wedding dress? We'll get it altered. Osgood, for all he's portrayed as a simpleton, is probably the most open-minded character in the whole movie. It's sweet, really.
So that's the sum total of my experience with Marilyn Monroe movies.
My father is the main reason I've watched as many classic movies as I have, since he's firmly of the opinion that no good movies have been made since 1960 or thereabouts (I exaggerate only slightly). We finally graduated to a colour TV when I was about five years old, after I had run to him with my two best friends in tow to settle an argument between us. They had come over and were shocked that Big Bird was white, when he was supposed to be yellow. There had ensued a hotly debated argument because, as far as I was concerned, Big Bird had always been white, and what the heck were they talking about? My father then sheepishly explained to me that we had an older television set that only showed black and white, but that in reality Big Bird was, in fact yellow. That prompted him to upgrade to a colour set, and while he was at it he bought a VHS player.
We'd watched a few movies at home before, when he'd borrowed a portable reel projector from the office. I remember sitting on the living room floor while he and my mother took down the paintings and other art from one wall, and hearing the click-click-whirr of the film reels while I watched the image flicker on the wall. It was incredibly exciting to be able to watch a movie at home like that, and that was how I watched Bambi and Peter and the Wolf and The Red Balloon (which made me cry so hard at the end I almost had hysterics and had to be carried out of the room). But those were incredibly special occasions, and my parents made a really big deal out of it.
The VCR changed our lives, because my father started taping everything off the TV. He would scour the newspaper and eventually the TV guide for movies that he either knew he liked or that I liked or that he thought we should watch. He learned how to program the VCR to record at specific times, and showed me how to use it too, when I was a little older. That was how I got to watch all my first Disney movies (Dumbo, Robin Hood, Pinocchio, The Jungle Book, and a few other cartoons that were not Disney, like Gulliver's Travels, and The Secret of NIMH). Oddly enough we seldom used it to tape TV shows, except for a British miniseries on PBS very loosely based on Black Beauty. The concept of re-watching a TV show remained rather alien to me until the introduction of DVDs, and even then not until the mid-2000's when TV show prices became somewhat more accessible to me (I had a regular job with a salary by then). We did use the VCR to tape pretty much every movie that ever aired on television, though. It's how I watched the Star Wars trilogy, how I watched most of the Indiana Jones trilogy (though the third one came out on the big screen when I was about ten, and so both my parents and I went to see it in theatres), and countless other movies.
So it was thanks to my father that I got introduced to many different types of film, from a pretty early age.
Under his guidance I watched a ton of Humphrey Bogart, who remains to this day one of my favourites, overshadowed only by Lauren Bacall. ("You do know how to whistle, don't you Steve? You just put your lips together... and blow." By the way, the implications of that also sailed right over my head until I was much, much older.) I have watched To Have and Have Not more times than I can count, and probably more times than I watched some Disney movies as a child, which is saying quite a bit. "Say... was you ever bit by a dead bee?" was also a family joke for quite some time.
I know a lot of people dislike Casablanca, and all I have to say about those people is that they are wrong. ;) Okay, more seriously, I don't understand how people can confuse a slow-paced, atmospheric movie with one that is "boring." Casablanca is rife with tension from beginning to end, tightly written and beautifully paced. Sure, there aren't any explosions or chases and there isn't much by way of violence, but that doesn't mean there's no conflict, by any means. While To Have and Have Not will always be my first love, I can't deny that Casablanca is by far the better movie (with TH&HN coming afterward and having a fairly similar plot, even though it was supposedly based on a short story by Hemingway).
A little-known movie with Bogart, or at least a movie that none of my friends seem to know, is one called The Enforcer. My father discovered this while he was away on one of his numerous trips abroad, flicking through the channels, and happened upon it. He loved it, knew I would love it, and taped it off the TV when he got home (I don't know what serendipitous timing intervened on our behalf, but I am grateful for it). It's a great noir film, tightly scripted and incredibly tense. It starts with the sole witness who can put a crime boss in jail committing suicide rather than testifying in court. The crime boss is a clever, scheming man who has put together a ring of murderers-for-hire and who never gets his hands dirty... except for the first job he ever did. It turns out there was a second witness, though, who would have been a child at the time, and now the race is on to find this little girl (now grown up) before the gang does. In short, it's a really good movie, and if you like hard-boiled noir detective stuff, then this is just the ticket for you.
Writing this post is making me want to go back and watch all those movies I loved as a child and a teenager. I haven't watched Doctor Zhivago in years, for instance. There's a long list of classics I haven't watched either, which I would love to get to. I keep telling myself that I should make a point of watching films outside the North American/Western European sphere, too. I've seen a few Eastern European movies in my lifetime, but as a rule film from other countries isn't on my radar. I used to watch more of them when I would go to the Montreal Film Festival, but I haven't been to that in... uh... *cringe* nearly a decade. I'll have to look into fixing that. To be fair, I don't watch many movies at all these days. My attention span seems well-suited to television shows and the occasional Marvel movie, and that's about it. Perhaps when things get a little less crazy I'll have a movie night once a week in which I'll challenge myself to watch things outside my comfort zone.
This has been a post.
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no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 01:49 pm (UTC)As for Casablanca, I'm afraid I'm one of those who dislikes it, but not for any other reason than that I cannot abide Bogart, nor stretch my imagination enough to ever imagine him as convincing in a romantic role. Love him in The Treasure of the Siera Madre (great great film!) because he basically plays an asshole, but that's about it.
For film noir, my faves are less gangster-y and more along the lines of crime-of-passions, like Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce. Sooooo juicy and fun, with snappy banter and characters you love to hate and sumptuous cinematography.
Doctor Zhivago is wonderful, and definitely worth watching again. Along the same lines, and also directed by David Lean, Laurence of Arabia is excellent. (Actually, you can't really go wrong with David Lean: A Passage to India is also outstanding.)
~Pasley
no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 01:58 pm (UTC)I do enjoy the snappy banter and the characters you love to hate, too. I've seen Lawrence of Arabia and A Passage to India as well. Great stuff.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 02:12 pm (UTC)We should do a movie marathon when things settle down for you. I have some original thrillers, some old noir with Tyrone Power, and old monster movies (King Kong, and I want to get the original Gojira). Sound like a plan?
no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 03:35 pm (UTC)I like Cassablanca, but my favourite Bogart picture is The African Queen. And I like Bogart, but my favourite classic film actor is James Cagney. And my favourite James Cagney film is White Heat. "Made it ma, top of the world!"
no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 04:58 pm (UTC)A few years ago I made a point of watching more classic films, including most of Marilyn Monroe's. I'd already seen Casablanca and Citizen Kane, but there were many others that I hadn't - Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Mildred Pierce. It was a worthwhile experience!
For some reason, movie theatres seem to play Casablanca as their last film before closing down... I can think of at least two that have done that.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 06:41 pm (UTC)It's funny that I think I dislike Bette Davis, and yet love most of her films: All About Eve (with a Marilyn cameo!), Now Voyager, Jezebel (with a very young Henry Fonda) and Dark Victory being at the top of my list of faves.
Ooh! Citizen Kane. I don't much care for Orson Wells' other films, but Citizen Kane is just mesmerizing to me. Got to rewatch it recently with my eldest, and she was blown away. Great to see it with someone who's never seen it before, and not just because of the ending ;)
no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 06:43 pm (UTC)~Pasley
no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-01 05:23 pm (UTC)My favorite Bogart movie, other than "African Queen", is "The Big Sleep". Film noir at its finest.