I am watching the animated series now! I haven’t seen enough to form an opinion except a bit of confusion over the giant half-eaten carrot sitting where Chekov should be. I think I can get through these in a couple weeks. You’re right, it is necessary if I want the total 1979 experience.  I will check out the reviews…

- HIPPIE: (playing crazy space-guitar) We’re gonna find our freeeedom, man, gonna spread our looooove, man...

I watched this week both parts of Fritz Lang’s Indian Tomb story. I wish I didn’t love so intensely these sort of colourful romantic fantasies, straight from the fevered colonial imagination! The Indian Tomb lays on the Eastern exoticism so thick I think it could have on its own inspired Professor Said to construct…

I spent this week’s movie nights with The Watergirl and Grande Illusion. Time with Renoir is time always well spent, particularly with Tropical Punch Koolaid and a big heap of lemon and chocolate wafer cookies.

I spent my first movie night this week with Street of Shame. It presented Mizoguchi’s usual life-draining forces: a selfish father, a greedy husband, a pathetic husband, an ungrateful child. But the protagonists were so much stronger than usual! Two of them refused to take crap from anyone, which was refreshing. I…

The Ghost of Slumber Mountain’s inexplicable “plot” I suspect was the author’s clumsy attempt to mimic Little Nemo in Slumberland. I don’t think anything would have been lost if the dinosaurs had instead been introduced in the first minute by the uncle saying “Look at those dinosaurs over there!”

This was Willis O’Brien week, two nights of dinosaurs. On Monday I watched the latest restoration of The Lost World - the Flicker Alley one - and it is incredible! There is so much new footage, the action flows so much better than before! I spent my second movie night with a bunch of O’Brien’s earlier short stories,…

You make a strong case. I promise if the house is ever sealed up to be fumigated I will put that movie on before leaving.

I watched this week Lost Horizon. As with La Fin du Monde last week, this movie was a pacifist response to the march toward war in the 1930s, was an over-budget super-production, was taken away from its director and hacked to a fraction of its intended size, and was, evidently, also ridiculed in its time. I hadn’t…

I watched this week La Fin du Monde, which is about a comet on course to collide with the world. I love this movie despite it not being anything close to what it might have been had it not been edited against Abel Gance’s will to less than half its intended length. As a result, the plot is nearly impossible to follow…

I watched this week J’Accuse, Abel Gance’s 1938 reimagining of his 1919 original. The accused in the original movie were the passive citisenry who lived out the war in relative comfort, accused on behalf of the millions of war dead. In the newer version of the story, the war dead rise this time to point their…

I watch movies mostly as travelogues, to feel afterwards as if I’ve been somewhere I haven’t otherwise been, and Rohmer delivers this so well! He obviously knows his spaces, the tiny book-filled Paris apartments, the big country houses, the city streets and the seaside. The stories in those settings - which is most of…

I concluded my winter with Eric Rohmer last week with The Loves of Astree and Celadon, which was a nice little romantic comedy set among Gallic druids, by Toutatis!

I’m nearly finished my winter with Eric Rohmer. Last week I watched The Englishwoman and The Duke, and Triple Agent. They were both stories of ex-patriots negotiating their way through dangerous political times, both stories with an anti-socialist undercurrent. The Englishwoman’s design is its most unique quality. But…

This week I finished the last of Eric Rohmer’s contemporary stories. The Mayor, The Tree, and the Mediatheque was surprisingly political! It was about a phenomenon that is common everywhere: the relative ease with which one can raise funds for new building projects alongside the near impossibility of raising funds to…

You’re right, they are definitely the warmest stories! Even the Spring and Summer stories that end without a successful coupling do so without any mean-spiritedness. The unpleasant characters aren’t as totally self-absorbed and deluded as those in his earlier movies. And there is so much suspense too because Rohmer…

I love that movie! Although I have to admit what I’m remembering I think is at least half from Mystery of the Wax Museum. Yes, that early Technicolour is such a treat! Everything all peachy and green. I’ve been thinking of it just tonight as I’m in a mood for a pirate movie and I’m certain The Black Pirate is also…

I watched this week Eric Rohmer’s Tales of Summer and of Autumn. The Autumn Tale is I think an informal sequel to Claire’s Knee. Both movies involve romantic machinations going on behind Beatrice Romand’s back, except this time they are well intentioned and not pervy. Autumn Tale is also a neat bookend to the earlier…

The Winter Tale also seems to me something of a response to The Good Marriage. The protagonist in the one doggedly pursues a man with whom she has no connection, and in the other, she merely waits for a true love to miraculously reappear.

Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday are landing on the same day this year. Having a chocolate and fecundity holiday coincide with a fasting and sackcloth holiday seems to me something of a mixed message. I plan to meet the problem half-way and smear a little chocolate cross on my forehead.