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Got a book off the shelf today, it's going to tell me what I should say
This cold has now officially progressed to the lying-on-the-couch-coughing-staring-at-movies stage. I don't know whether to forecast reviews or radio silence. Might depend on the movies. Angel Face (1953) by Otto Preminger was noir by the numbers to me until it opened into the perspective of its main female character, at which point the story of a spoilt seductress, the patsy who wants no part of her, and a murder gone wrong becomes much less familiarly nasty, much more unavoidably tragic—it has a killer ending and a performance that I hope Jean Simmons is remembered for, even if so much of it only becomes exemplary in hindsight. I had no idea the original live TV version of Twelve Angry Men (1954) had even been recorded, but the smutchy, irreplaceable kinescope runs exactly an hour, is very effectively less personal than the later stage and film versions, and proves that when I thought Robert Cummings was underpowered as a leading man in The Black Book (1949), he was probably just underwritten. I had the company of a very good movie cat and later my husband (who points out that Twelve Angry Men directly prefigures 1776 in its exploration of important civic issues through a male ensemble yelling at each other in a very hot room—it even uses the same device of counting down each vote toward consensus or catastrophe). Also the cold, but it is an unwelcome guest.
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Bast, of dubious memory, preferred reality television selections, viz. My Cat from Hell, but a cat who can sit a whole movie is probably more discerning.
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I've never seen that! Hmm.
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It's great on the hardships of establishing yourself independently and going against societal expectations (... most thirteen-year-old girls are not establishing their independence), and the choices you make.
The background characters and the scenery are all wonderful; Miyazaki's love of humanity shines through it.
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I'll watch it!
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This is a very true thing.
Bast, of dubious memory, preferred reality television selections, viz. My Cat from Hell, but a cat who can sit a whole movie is probably more discerning.
Two Halloweens ago, he watched Edgar C. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934) with us. For the record, unlike many movies which have been described to me as weird, that one is legitimately batshit and upsettingly so: it's like two or three axes of interwar nightmare all rolled together, full of the symbols of black magic and science fiction, but there's nothing speculative in it, only the horror of historical atrocity imprinting itself on the landscape like a haunting and human perversity that fetishizes it calling up the ghost again. You can see how it's spiraled back around to relevance these days. But it does contain a significant black cat. And halfway through, Autolycus came into my darkened office where we were watching, hopped up on the desk, and curled himself around my laptop with his tail lying over the right-hand side of the keyboard and his head peering down over the top of the screen into the illuminated action. It was a wonderful image which we could not photograph. He looked like a tutelary spirit. We told him that the black cat escaped along with the standard young couple at the end.
Much less elevatedly, he once watched The Cat from Outer Space (1978) with me and batted occasionally at the screen as if to make contact. Speaking of things with Roddy McDowall in them.
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Oh, my God, that sounds amazing.
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Good cat!
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Gosh, it makes up for people being wrong on the internet.