Just a quick note in case anything I do turns out to affect any RSS feeds, etc.: I will be making some changes over the next few days here at the site. Mostly, I will be adding links to all the Highlander posts so they can more easily be read sequentially (if only by me—hey, I enjoyed those) and adding a brief episode synopsis to each Jonny Quest post, for anyone who wants a less…interpretive idea of what’s going on in those.
In thanks for your attention, here is some of the currency of the internet: a cat picture.
Synopsis: A political plotter thinks he can unite all Arab peoples around a stolen Egyptian artifact. Unfortunately for him, the theft gets the attention of Team Quest and of an ancient mummy, whose animated, revenge-focused existence fails to raise a single scientific eyebrow during the entire episode.
Tip 8: There’s nothing wrong with a little book-learning once in a while, even if you are an Intrepid Adventurer.
Gather around, troopers! Today we learn about the pathetic fallacy.
In addition to being one of those terms that sounds like an insult when shouted fast enough, the pathetic fallacy is usually used to describe nature imitating mood in art. Every crooner in a music video who ever sang sad songs to his girl in the rain was standing right in one of those things, as was nearly everyone in Wuthering Heights most of the time.
But, as its Wikipedia page reminds us, the phrase was sometimes used less to describe the devices themselves—the Rain of Sorrowful Tears, the Storm of Emotional Unrest, the Unseasonably Sunny Day of Joy—than the effect. How the sky seems less bright when you’ve just been dumped, for example.
Which pharaoh was known for his unerring sense of drama again?
Or how spooky the moon looks when you’re being stalked by an unearthly revenant bent on retrieving its sacred artifact. You know.
Next time: Honestly, The Bride of Frankenstein. I swear!
Next time on TQfM!: We mine similar ground to this great work of the canon.
Writing my post last week sent me off on a tangent, so this time I’m changing the plan slightly and going back to what, in 1993, was one of my favorite movies.
Why Found-Again? Honestly, talking about my love for Kenneth Branagh/Emma Thompson makes me feel like I’m about a thousand years old. (Imagine the Highlander posts I could have written if I were! Speaking of tangents….)
I was fifteen when Siskel & Ebert reviewed Branagh’s Henry V and vividly remember the discussion about how Branagh might be the next Olivier and was otherwise an up-and-coming cinematic Big Thing. For some reason—I’m not a huge fan of the play even after several Shakespeare classes, so it wasn’t Henry as such—I found this very exciting. Two years later, I was also watching Siskel & Ebert when Dead Again, Branagh’s new movie with his then-wife Emma Thompson, got worse reviews.
I didn’t see it till I was nineteen, but once I did, I was hooked. The apparent king and queen of movies in a noirish supernatural thriller—how could I be anything but smitten?
The Premise: A mute, traumatized woman (Thompson) shows up at an orphanage with no apparent memory of who she is; the nuns turn to one of their former charges, hard-boiled PI Mike Church (Branagh), for help. The further Mike digs into the case, however, the more it seems the trauma might have its roots in a famous murder from 1948, linked to the woman’s past life…or his own. But will forgotten crimes be reincarnated as well?
From a stylistic perspective (which readers have probably deduced I have little ability to analyze, but onward!), Dead Again hits all the classic noir beats: the LA setting, the Old Hollywood glamor of the flashback sequences, the dark corners and plot twists and dramatic camera angles.
…and Andy Garcia, noiring even harder than Alec Baldwin.
The cast is likewise great, with the two leads joined by Derek Jacobi as a chiseling antique dealer/hypnotist, Wayne Knight as Church’s friend, Andy Garcia as a 1940s reporter who gets too involved, and a great turn by Robin Williams as a cantankerous ex-shrink who works in a grocery store. You shouldn’t have slept with that patient, pal.
That said, rewatching Dead Again is a little like rewatching Highlander for me: once there’s enough distance from the initial adrenaline rush, doubts begin to creep in. Some of the events seem a little disconnected from each other, in that way where the story makes more sense when you describe it aloud than when you’re watching it on the screen. And then there’s the plot twist, which is not quite as twisty in 2015 as it was in the early 1990s.
The Verdict: Be aware that it comes from someone who fretted over the Branagh-Thompson divorce in a way I’ve never cared about famous people before or since when I say that Dead Again is… just a little goofy. It seems to have moved into that category of movie that I don’t mind watching alone, but am slightly embarrassed to show to other people; the very things I love about it are all a bit embarrassing to explain, and the whole thing seems so dependent on mood.
Parts of this movie are none too subtle on the symbolism, either.
I’d hoped a re-viewing after several years’ abstinence would put me back in touch with everything I adored about the film, but it didn’t quite happen.
On the other hand, the movie and even the trailer still give me chills. I suppose for a movie about reincarnation, hope really might spring eternal.
Might go well with: Little hors d’oeuvres. You thought I was going to make a twice-baked potato joke, didn’t you?
Synopsis: A political plotter thinks he can unite all Arab peoples around a stolen Egyptian artifact. Unfortunately for him, the theft gets the attention of Team Quest and of an ancient mummy, whose animated, revenge-focused existence fails to raise a single scientific eyebrow during the entire episode.
Tip 7: Religion and politics don’t mix.
Like this fellow, you may think that “When there is real unity among Arab nations, Anubis will bless us”—
Usually, there are only two reasons a character in fiction wears a white suit; I’m pretty sure the mustache alone rules out “angel.”
But such discussions require a very specific sort of audience.
I.e., not this one.
You never know whom you might offend…and you’d better hope it’s not the gods.
(Author’s note: I can’t tell you all how happy I am to reach this episode. I forgot the first two Jonny Quests were straightforward adventure stories—easy to do when you’ve seen some of the weirder ones!—and have been spending many Mondays slumped over my laptop whining about how much I miss Highlander. But now…you know…we can start the party.)
Next time: Bride of Frankenstein, because I’m pretty sure I’ve really seen that one before.
Why Found-Again? Like Vertigo from earlier this year, it’s hard to tell—given the combined forces of old Saturday movies, horror documentaries and Mel Brooks parodies—whether I’ve actually seen Frankenstein before. I’m not going to let that stop me, though. I can “IT’S ALIVE!!!” with the best of them.
The Premise: Blah, blah, body-snatching, meddling with blah that man was never meant to blah, neglecting the love of your life for MAD SCIENCE!, mayhem, fire bad, blah.
You may gather from the above that I am not completely happy with my viewing, or indeed with the Frankenstein(‘s monster) idea in general: like Romero-style zombies, it’s a horror genre for which the symbolic richness of the idea far outweighs any interest I have in watching the actual product. I haven’t even seen the Kenneth Branagh adaptation, and that was made when I still thought of Branagh as a minor deity.
And now that I’ve finished it, I think I must not have watched the 1931 Frankenstein before after all: finding out that the brain-stealing scene in the Mel Brooks movie was lifted nearly wholesale came as an almost physical shock.
Seriously?
Even so, I found the monster’s electric birth and subsequent misery very moving…only to run up against the angry mob at the end. Like the brain theft, it was familiar—but it seems it’s a lot harder to get the mood back from memories of Transylvania 6-5000.
It doesn’t take a “normal” brain to know this won’t end well.
Other random thoughts:
I love the futuristic font the movie title is written in at the beginning, even though most of the rest of the film seems terribly old-fashioned by comparison.
Remember when I said that if you don’t love the character Rachel in Highlander, you are a terrible person? The same goes for Boris Karloff. I don’t even hold a grudge over the very misnamed The Man They Could Not Hang. (They definitely did, to death and possibly beyond; it just didn’t take.)
Henry Frankenstein—Henry??—seems like a man who could profitably take relationship advice from Werewolf of London’s Wilfred Glendon. It’s that bad.
For a guy getting choked to death, Fritz (known to the popular consciousness as Igor) sure can scream.
I am half-convinced that after his collapse, Henry goes to the same sanitarium James Bond repaired to after the unfortunate genital incident in Casino Royale.
Imagine a mob of angry villagers, each wearing my grandfather’s hat.
Your author in 1977 doing likewise.
The Verdict: It’s not Frankenstein, it’s me. I made it through Halloween even though I’d seen it all before, Charade wasn’t ruined because American Dreamer ripped off its beginning, but I had a very hard time with this one. It’s a shame—this is the only Frankenstein movie I’ve ever watched that wasn’t a bride-of movie or a parody of some sort—but it just isn’t my cup of tea.
Might go well with: Bratwurst, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, millinery.
Next time: The monster hits keep coming when The Quest for Monday returns!
Synopsis: When an experimental missile goes down in the Arctic, the Quests try to find it before enemy agents do. They fail in this and are captured, but manage to detonate the missile, keeping its secrets safe. They also see a lot of wildlife.
Tip 6: Don’t be afraid to take risks in service of doing the right thing.
“Even if it kills Race…I mean, me.”
…Especially if the right thing involves big, splashy explosions that wipe out the bad guys.
If this were in the South, someday one of my relatives would give directions by saying, “Turn left where that old downed missile used to be…”
Next time: Found-Again Friday will likely be postponed; the good news is, the movie I once rated as the worst I’d ever seen has not yet arrived from Netflix. Which brings us to…
Next time on TQfM!: In case I haven’t mentioned it oftenenough, I really like mummies.
Are you really going to pretend this is “Found-Again” for you? In October?? Nah. Turns out I miss writing about horror movies, and it’s the season, so.
The Premise: Charles Dexter Ward (Vincent Price) and his wife Ann (Debra Paget) inherit a spooky house in Arkham, complete with undead caretaker and a painting of Ward’s ancestor, the sorcerer Joseph Curwen (played, after his inevitable revival, by Vincent Price looking even hotter).
“Hi! We’re cute and guileless! Which way to the evil old manor, please?”Curwen, before he was burned to death in his own yard, ran what could euphemistically be called a captive breeding program between hypnotized women and Elder Gods. As a result, the townspeople of Arkham suffer from strange deformities and are understandably afraid that lookalike Ward might be going into the family business.
The Haunted Palace is nominally one of the Poe adaptations Roger Corman made with Vincent Price back in the 1960s, and it does begin and end with readings from the poem. Really, though, it’s H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward novella run through a sort of Poe/Gothic filter of creaky castles, velvet coats and women in distress. It’s also my favorite of those adaptations*—but we all know I’m a little weird.
This movie is so Gothic, even the hero gets a white nightgown.I vacillate as to which version of this villain is worse: the mad-scientist cannibal necromancer Curwen in 1991’s The Resurrected(which I now own on DVD! One more for Unwanted Eyeball Violence Row…) or this one, who sneers so well and just digs up one old girlfriend and only kills people in a straightforward, laws-of-physics kind of way. But the premise of The Haunted Palace is thoroughly nasty, even though the nastiness is obscured by the lack of gore and the Silly-Puttyesque special effects, so I’m tempted to give 1963 Curwen the advantage.
Though he’s quite nice to look at, in a domineering, probably-cheating-on-you-with-his-dead-girlfriend kind of way.The Verdict: I’m not going to say that this is perfect: I never make it through the movie without joking that the casting call for the role of Ann should’ve said “Must be able to yell the word ‘Charles!’ upwards of 20 times a minute.” Then there’s the painting, which is supposed to be 18th century but appears to be a self-portrait by Vincent van Price.
Not exaggerating even a tiny bit.Also, what kind of stone can be set on fire by angry villagers?
Even so, it’s well-done and genuinely creepy at times, with a great performance from Price in which you can easily tell which character he is at any given moment. Heck, he’s worth watching for the evil Latin recitations alone.
*For those of you keeping track of such things, I’ve seen seven of the eight and would rank them in this order: 2) Masque of the Red Death; 3) Tales of Terror; 4) Pit and the Pendulum; 5) tie betweenFall of the House of Usher and Tomb of Ligeia, mainly due to poor Price’s costume in Usher, which is sort of Little Lord Fauntleroy via the ninth circle of Hell; 6) The Raven.
Synopsis: When an experimental missile goes down in the Arctic, the Quests try to find it before enemy agents do. They fail in this and are captured, but manage to detonate the missile, keeping its secrets safe. They also see a lot of wildlife.
Tip 5: Always take time to note the native fauna.
A trip to the polar regions is a good time to get close to the animals:
Despite common preconceptions,these bears prefer Sprite; it doesn’t stain their fur. Camouflage is paramount.The rare Sam Waterston‘s Whale, with characteristic eyebrows.
On the other hand, responsible explorers will take care not to get too close.
