Cinemaventure

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince opened here in the U. S. yesterday after an eight-month delay when Warners wanted to save a "blockbuster" for summer release. A blockbuster it is and I was not disappointed by this latest installment of the Harry Potter saga. The previous two films, Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix played fast and loose with the books and missed a number of opportunities to create some real feeling. Especially missed was the book's scene (Phoenix) at St. Mungo's Hospital when Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny encounter Neville Longbottom visiting his parents, tortured into madness by Belatrix Lestrange, a Death Eater who makes Voldemort seem a pleasant person. Of course time constraints force a lot of a book's content to be scrapped, but the writers seemed to make some poor choices in films four and five. Phoenix (again) fails to explain why the Dementors attacked Harry in the opening scenes. One line could have done it. That's a...

Today, 20 June, 2009, is the 100th birthday of the greatest of all screen Swashbucklers, Errol Flynn. Born in Hobart, Tasmania Flynn's early life was filled with all sorts of adventures. He was chosen to play Fletcher Christian in the 1933 Australian film In The Wake of the Bounty . The film was dreadful but Flynn showed charisma as Christian (an ancestor) and he got bitten by the acting bug. He made his way to England and eventually to Hollywood. A few small parts gained him notice and he wound up replacing Robert Donat in the Warner Bros production of Captain Blood (1935). This was his first teaming with the lovely Olivia de Havilland and the chemistry was perfect. More roles followed and in 1938 Flynn and de Havilland starred in the best (in my not-so-humble opinion) Swashbuckler to ever reach the theater screens. Seventy-one years later it still has not been topped, nor equalled. The Technicolor film captured Medieval England (transplanted to California) and Eri...

Yep. I'm a Monster Kid. Have been for almost 50 years since I first discovered a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine around 1959 or 1960. Before that my sister and I would catch as many horror flicks as possible. Rodan, Earth vs. the Spider, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Horror of Dracula and The Mummy are only a few that come to mind. Anything by Ray Harryhausen we would see twice. It was a fun time to grow up. And then I discovered Famous Monsters and Forrest J. Ackerman. Uncle Forry introduced me to the people behind the movies. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi became real people and not just faces on the big screen. I was introduced to Lon Chaney, Sr. and his wonderful movies and learned about James Whale and Karl Freund. I learned how Ray Harryhausen made saucers fly and monsters walk. The success of Famous Monsters brought other monster zines. Charlton offered a couple of titles for instance. Cheaper paper and fuzzy pictures, but they sometimes had so...

Moonraker should have been the best entry in the Bond series to date, but unfortunately it was sabotaged by the script. There is often a fine line between witty and witless and Christopher Wood's screenplay was mostly on the wrong side of the line. The jokes were unusually tasteless and the handling of the character "Jaws" was like something out of a bad comic book. Visually Moonraker was gorgeous, but, unfortunately, the sound mixing made it easy to hear the dialog. The idea of a madman wanting to kill off Earth's population, except for certain "genetically superior" specimens was old hat in Science Fiction but offered possibilities. The visual effects of the space station and battle in space were stunning. So you definitely had the good and the bad here. "Jaws", introduced in The Spy Who Loved Me and played by Richard Kiel was another of the almost superhuman henchmen loved by the fans, but here he walked away from events that no human could s...

I always enjoyed going to the monster and horror flicks as a kid. For about four years we lived a block away from a neighborhood movie theater, the Park, in east Knoxville. This is where I first saw House of Wax , in 3D, no less. I was introduced to the wonderful world of Ray Harryhausen through Earth Vs The Flying Saucers, 20 Million Miles To Earth and, my favorite, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad . On occasion my sister and I would catch the bus downtown and see Rodan, Earth Vs the Spider and even turkeys such as The Viking Women . I did have some standards and refused to watch the bargain basement losers like King Kong Vs Godzilla for example . And then we discovered Hammer Films and the great team of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. A new world in glorious color opened up. Even today I enjoy watching these old movies when I get the chance. I would like the opportunity to see some of Bert I. Gordon's movies again. They were low budget, but fun. I watched The Viking Women ...

"Sean Connery Is James Bond!" was the slogan that attempted to draw audiences away from Casino Royale (1967) which claimed "Casino Royale is too big for one James Bond" The folks at Eon had nothing to worry about with the competition. Casino Royale was a costly fiasco and offered no real competition or entertainment value. On the other hand Eon tied in its fortunes with a star who wanted to leave the series. You Only Twice began the silly season for the James Bond films. So far gadgets were not overly intrusive and there was still some basis in the real world. But Raold Dahl's script changed that, resulting in the silliest moments to date in the series. For example we have James Bond trying to pass as Japanese. It doesn't work and Connery doesn't seem to be working hard at it, either. Also, the attempt to kill Bond by some inept thugs in a car chase indicates the bad guys are going to be pushovers and lack any subtlety at all. The last thing they woul...

Indiana Jones is back and it's worth going to the theater to see a movie. I always loved going to the movies when I was younger. Of course the only options we had available were to see the movie at the theater or wait several years for it to show up on TV. The options for collectors were limited (in the US at least) to 8mm or 16mm films. When home video was introduced the quality was iffy and prices were high. Video stores could charge, and get, $10 a pop. As a kid fifty cents would bet me in the movie, a bag of popcorn, a coke and maybe a small box of candy. I still remember the sticker shock when tickets went up to a dollar. Even that was affordable enough to catch several movies in a week. For that matter, most movies didn't play over a week at any one theater unless it was a special like West Side Story for example. Now, I still enjoy seeing movies on a large screen, but the multiplex screens aren't that big and ticket prices are disgraceful. I only go to barg...