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Their symmetry gets right inside me
Last night we reconstructed our Linux-driven pseudo-TV and tried it out; tonight we had a full-fledged movie night complete with movie cat and I feel the fact that we have just finished Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharoahs (1955) proves that I will put up with almost any amount of soap in exchange for some decent engineering, although it was a close thing. Alexis Minotis as a wry and honest High Priest of Amun helped. Joan Collins made up like Jean Simmons in Black Narcissus (1947) did not. According to TCM, Hawks really wanted to make a movie about the building of a pyramid and was obliged to come up with a plot to justify it and the order of importance shows; the best scenes look like Cinemascope translations of double-page spreads from David Macaulay's Pyramid (1975) complete with thousands of extras and location shooting that verges on the Fitzcarraldo—one exterior set involved redressing the Unfinished Northern Pyramid of Zawyet El Aryan—and then the palace intrigue is pasted on with lines of dialogue like "Even a queen may be lonely" and gratuitous misrepresentation of cobras. The finale is spectacular and ironic and the film doesn't quite seem to realize just how powerful it could have been if thematically rather than moralistically built up to. Afterward in trying to find an article about the labor strike at Set Maat I was reminded of the Shit Pyramids of Sneferu, which cheered me up considerably. I can't believe I have finally seen an Egyptian epic that made me feel better about Cecil B. DeMille.
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Thank you! I am glad to have spread the word of the Bent Pyramid.
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*blinks*
I may just have lost one fingernail's worth of gay. I can't explain it. It was just here.
Edit because there is no tone on the internet: the sliver of gay was killed off by yet another perpetuation of brownface, not anything to do with the usual appearance of Collins or Simmons at the time.
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It makes even less sense in the case of Collins than in the case of Simmons. None of the rest of the principal cast of Land of the Pharaohs is in brownface, even though they are almost all white British and American actors playing ancient Egyptians—Jack Hawkins just looks like himself in a pile of Fourth Dynasty jewelry. Characters explicitly identified as captives from Kush look like Khufu turned left at Rhakotis and accidentally raided Northern Europe instead. And then there's Collins hailing from Cyprus in that particular unfortunate dusky panstick against which her tangerine lipstick stands out like a catastrophe in the color timing and I don't know what to tell you.
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It's true. By all rights it should deliquesced under its own steam at least three millennia ago. And yet. I think it's because it was too embarrassing to disappear.
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Translating David Macaulay's book to screen sounds worth putting up with a good deal for, especially if you have some cats to keep your lap warm as you watch.
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They are not drawn to particular melodies! You cannot teach a child to play a snake-charming tune and then release a snake on the night and wait for him and/or his mother to be assassinated! Besides, they don't just strike whomever they find first! Even venomous snakes are shy of people! Justice for cobra, I say.
Translating David Macaulay's book to screen sounds worth putting up with a good deal for, especially if you have some cats to keep your lap warm as you watch.
Absolutely everything about the engineering of a pyramid was brilliant.
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JUSTICE FOR COBRAS!