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And did I panic? I think not
I did not see Stephen Sommers' The Mummy (1999) when it came out in the spring of my senior year of high school. At that point in my life I watched very few movies and when I did they were mostly social activities or taped off the television in black and white and this one looked big, loud, stupid, and above all not Boris Karloff. My then-boyfriend saw it without me; he reported a lot of computer-generated gore and scarabs. I didn't bother. Flash forward eighteen years and all of a sudden I'm seeing The Mummy and its first sequel namechecked everywhere as paramount examples of heroic female geekery and a het romance that actually works. Yesterday was characterized by exhaustion and eye-crossing headache and I needed a distraction, so I got a slightly scratched DVD out of the library and decided to see what I was missing.
The film is big, and it is loud, and the Orientalism goes up to eleven, but it knows it's not Boris Karloff and I don't think it's stupid. It's adventure pulp made by people who knew Spielberg was never going to come through with the further exploits of Indiana Jones—and must have felt smug when he finally did and they were The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)—and while the generation loss of making a homage to a homage could have left The Mummy insubstantial and ironic, instead it plays with the breezy fast pace and selectively sidestepped tropes of a blockbuster that looks like everyone who made it actually had fun. Rachel Weisz as Evie Carnahan is a one-woman screwball comedy, bespectacled as Cary Grant, chaos-making as Katharine Hepburn; still so young that she's curly-haired and kitten-faced, she's also the most accomplished Egyptologist in the story ("Take that, Bembridge scholars!") and I couldn't help noticing that while the climax does find her in need of rescue from your traditional lost-love resurrection ritual, the bulk of the plot on either side turns directly on her actions, from pursuing a childhood dream of the lost city of Hamunaptra to identifying a crucial hieroglyph by rather shaky description alone while dodging a priesthood's worth of murderous mummies. Opposite her, Brendan Fraser as soldier of fortune Rick O'Connell has to be good in order not to get wiped out of his own top billing and he is—he can do casual rugged heroism with tongue discreetly in cheek, he looks splendid in the Army-cut fashions of the '20's, and it gets funnier every time he reacts to the intimidating roar of something evil by screaming his face off right back at it. They fall in love like all the best adventurers, doing absurdly competent and foolhardy things while looking as though they can't believe their luck that the other person is right there alongside them. Kevin O'Connor is such an unapologetic weasel as Beni, ex-Legionnaire turned mummy's Renfield, that despite the script's explicit warning that "nasty little fellows such as yourself always get their comeuppance," I was still sorry to see him get his, and John Hannah's Jonathan Carnahan proves that I am incapable of not overthinking even summer blockbuster pulp, because when I see, in 1926, a young-ish Englishman that drunk, that flippant, and that good with firearms, I can't help wondering if his war was the Western Front or the Mesopotamian campaign. I am pretty sure that Odad Fehr's Ardeth Bay survives his heroic self-sacrifice by sheer force of beauty, but with that profile and those tattoos I'll buy it. And Arnold Vosloo makes a surprisingly effective Imhotep who resembles his 1932 incarnation only in his love for a woman three thousand years gone; he spends most of the movie in a partial state of motion capture, but whenever he's more or less human, he is as intense and solemn as if he's starring in a romantic tragedy, not a monster movie, which from his perspective is true enough.
From everyone else's, of course, it is a monster movie, with faces emerging hollow-mouthed from sandstorms and gem-like scarabs slithering under people's skin and skeletal mummies clashing swords like the return of Ray Harryhausen. The plot is the sort of thing you expect when no one in an ancient Egyptian royal court sees the potential blowback of deploying a curse whose object can, if exposed to the right incantations, come back as an immortal sand demon with the power to summon plagues from a different mythology entirely, and no one in the present day believes in the existence of such curses except for the hereditary caste of warriors who have become as mythical as the sand-drowned city they guard. There are seekers of knowledge versus hunters of treasure, the return of the repressed in sun-snuffing style. Everybody gets at least one moment of pure heroism and one moment of pure comedy and sometimes they're the same thing. Refreshingly, for all the prevailing goofiness, the script has few true moments of idiot plot and they are at least doozies when they arrive. (It's a nice gruesome touch when Imhotep begins to supplement his eviscerated body with living organs harvested from the disturbers of his tomb, but then he should spend the rest of the movie bumping into furniture, since those shiny new eyeballs of his came from a man who canonically had trouble finding his way down a hallway after his glasses were knocked off.) The CGI does not hold up, exactly, but for the most part it's not objectionable and even pulls off some nice effects that don't need to look naturalistic, like the spirit of Patricia Velásquez's Anck-su-namun boiling thickly out of a sacred pool with the weird purplish sheen of corona discharge, eddying over her vacant body without ever quite settling into recognizable human shape.
What really does not hold up, and honestly should not have even in 1999, is the racism. There is a redshirt in the form of a corrupt prison warden who accompanies our heroes to Hamunaptra; he is played by Omid Djalili and his purpose is to demonstrate how dangerous it is to go wandering off alone in a city haunted by an undead high priest and his cursed followers, but I feel this could have been accomplished without jokes that would not have been out of place in Girl of the Port (1930). I mean, I appreciate that the script tries to be even-handed with its stereotypes by making the rival team of treasure-hunting Americans a bunch of gung-ho literal cowboys, but the fact remains that trigger-happy Yankees are less flatly offensive than an Arab character hawking and spitting on cue of a British character's disgusted remark about the expectoratory habits of camels. I have less trouble with Beni because he is so generically Eurotrash, like a turbo-charged Peter Lorre caricature; after Erick Avari's indignant introduction, it's nice to discover that his obstructive curator of the Cairo Museum of Antiquities is more than he seemed when he was chewing Evie out for trashing his library before half-destroying Jonathan's tattered, ancient find of a map. I almost wish more had been made of the casual reveal that the Carnahan siblings are, despite their all-British names and received pronunciation, half-Egyptian—"You see, my father was a very, very famous explorer and he loved Egypt so much, he married my mother, who was an Egyptian and quite an adventurer herself"—although that would have raised even more strongly the question of appropriate casting. (Send help, I just pictured Siddig El Fadil as Jonathan and now I am wistful.) There are conventions of adventure pulp that simply no longer need to be observed and I am sorry The Mummy thought its period setting would gloss them. I prefer when it remembers to subvert all of its tropes, as with the fact that Ardeth Bay's Medjai know damn well where the lost city is, they just don't want anybody visiting.
I have been awake since seven o'clock this morning and spent the day traveling and write this review from a motel in Pennsylvania while![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch catches up on the news on the bed behind me; I don't know what else I can say about this movie except that it is on the whole a really adorable adventure with a couple of sour notes I wish it hadn't struck and the people who recommend it for its heroine were right. I don't know if I would have enjoyed it in high school. I had much less experience of pulp in any form and might have bounced off the three-way mash-up of horror, humor, and action, especially since I thought I disliked two of those genres for years. (I thought I disliked alcohol for years. It turned out what I disliked was the kinds of alcohol college students think is a good idea. So too with horror film and action movies.) I suspect I would have enjoyed Evie; nerd heroes are rare and female nerd heroes practically unicorns. I would have been very impressed by Anck-su-namun's costume, which I did not realize was primarily body paint until it smudged under Imhotep's hands. I would have liked Jonathan, but that is predictable: he is light-fingered and almost resolutely irresponsible, but not actually stupid—he bashes his way through hieroglyphs decently enough for magic and picks a plot-relevant pocket not once but three times in the film, each time with aplomb. I remember picking up the novelization in the Waldenbooks where I worked in the late '90's and early 2000's, but I don't remember anything about it except one stray line that evidently changed between shooting script and final cut. I haven't been able to get hold of Michael Almereyda's Trance/The Eternal (1998) and I wanted something with mummies even if they didn't come out of a bog. This excavation brought to you by my library-loving backers at Patreon.
The film is big, and it is loud, and the Orientalism goes up to eleven, but it knows it's not Boris Karloff and I don't think it's stupid. It's adventure pulp made by people who knew Spielberg was never going to come through with the further exploits of Indiana Jones—and must have felt smug when he finally did and they were The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)—and while the generation loss of making a homage to a homage could have left The Mummy insubstantial and ironic, instead it plays with the breezy fast pace and selectively sidestepped tropes of a blockbuster that looks like everyone who made it actually had fun. Rachel Weisz as Evie Carnahan is a one-woman screwball comedy, bespectacled as Cary Grant, chaos-making as Katharine Hepburn; still so young that she's curly-haired and kitten-faced, she's also the most accomplished Egyptologist in the story ("Take that, Bembridge scholars!") and I couldn't help noticing that while the climax does find her in need of rescue from your traditional lost-love resurrection ritual, the bulk of the plot on either side turns directly on her actions, from pursuing a childhood dream of the lost city of Hamunaptra to identifying a crucial hieroglyph by rather shaky description alone while dodging a priesthood's worth of murderous mummies. Opposite her, Brendan Fraser as soldier of fortune Rick O'Connell has to be good in order not to get wiped out of his own top billing and he is—he can do casual rugged heroism with tongue discreetly in cheek, he looks splendid in the Army-cut fashions of the '20's, and it gets funnier every time he reacts to the intimidating roar of something evil by screaming his face off right back at it. They fall in love like all the best adventurers, doing absurdly competent and foolhardy things while looking as though they can't believe their luck that the other person is right there alongside them. Kevin O'Connor is such an unapologetic weasel as Beni, ex-Legionnaire turned mummy's Renfield, that despite the script's explicit warning that "nasty little fellows such as yourself always get their comeuppance," I was still sorry to see him get his, and John Hannah's Jonathan Carnahan proves that I am incapable of not overthinking even summer blockbuster pulp, because when I see, in 1926, a young-ish Englishman that drunk, that flippant, and that good with firearms, I can't help wondering if his war was the Western Front or the Mesopotamian campaign. I am pretty sure that Odad Fehr's Ardeth Bay survives his heroic self-sacrifice by sheer force of beauty, but with that profile and those tattoos I'll buy it. And Arnold Vosloo makes a surprisingly effective Imhotep who resembles his 1932 incarnation only in his love for a woman three thousand years gone; he spends most of the movie in a partial state of motion capture, but whenever he's more or less human, he is as intense and solemn as if he's starring in a romantic tragedy, not a monster movie, which from his perspective is true enough.
From everyone else's, of course, it is a monster movie, with faces emerging hollow-mouthed from sandstorms and gem-like scarabs slithering under people's skin and skeletal mummies clashing swords like the return of Ray Harryhausen. The plot is the sort of thing you expect when no one in an ancient Egyptian royal court sees the potential blowback of deploying a curse whose object can, if exposed to the right incantations, come back as an immortal sand demon with the power to summon plagues from a different mythology entirely, and no one in the present day believes in the existence of such curses except for the hereditary caste of warriors who have become as mythical as the sand-drowned city they guard. There are seekers of knowledge versus hunters of treasure, the return of the repressed in sun-snuffing style. Everybody gets at least one moment of pure heroism and one moment of pure comedy and sometimes they're the same thing. Refreshingly, for all the prevailing goofiness, the script has few true moments of idiot plot and they are at least doozies when they arrive. (It's a nice gruesome touch when Imhotep begins to supplement his eviscerated body with living organs harvested from the disturbers of his tomb, but then he should spend the rest of the movie bumping into furniture, since those shiny new eyeballs of his came from a man who canonically had trouble finding his way down a hallway after his glasses were knocked off.) The CGI does not hold up, exactly, but for the most part it's not objectionable and even pulls off some nice effects that don't need to look naturalistic, like the spirit of Patricia Velásquez's Anck-su-namun boiling thickly out of a sacred pool with the weird purplish sheen of corona discharge, eddying over her vacant body without ever quite settling into recognizable human shape.
What really does not hold up, and honestly should not have even in 1999, is the racism. There is a redshirt in the form of a corrupt prison warden who accompanies our heroes to Hamunaptra; he is played by Omid Djalili and his purpose is to demonstrate how dangerous it is to go wandering off alone in a city haunted by an undead high priest and his cursed followers, but I feel this could have been accomplished without jokes that would not have been out of place in Girl of the Port (1930). I mean, I appreciate that the script tries to be even-handed with its stereotypes by making the rival team of treasure-hunting Americans a bunch of gung-ho literal cowboys, but the fact remains that trigger-happy Yankees are less flatly offensive than an Arab character hawking and spitting on cue of a British character's disgusted remark about the expectoratory habits of camels. I have less trouble with Beni because he is so generically Eurotrash, like a turbo-charged Peter Lorre caricature; after Erick Avari's indignant introduction, it's nice to discover that his obstructive curator of the Cairo Museum of Antiquities is more than he seemed when he was chewing Evie out for trashing his library before half-destroying Jonathan's tattered, ancient find of a map. I almost wish more had been made of the casual reveal that the Carnahan siblings are, despite their all-British names and received pronunciation, half-Egyptian—"You see, my father was a very, very famous explorer and he loved Egypt so much, he married my mother, who was an Egyptian and quite an adventurer herself"—although that would have raised even more strongly the question of appropriate casting. (Send help, I just pictured Siddig El Fadil as Jonathan and now I am wistful.) There are conventions of adventure pulp that simply no longer need to be observed and I am sorry The Mummy thought its period setting would gloss them. I prefer when it remembers to subvert all of its tropes, as with the fact that Ardeth Bay's Medjai know damn well where the lost city is, they just don't want anybody visiting.
I have been awake since seven o'clock this morning and spent the day traveling and write this review from a motel in Pennsylvania while
spatch catches up on the news on the bed behind me; I don't know what else I can say about this movie except that it is on the whole a really adorable adventure with a couple of sour notes I wish it hadn't struck and the people who recommend it for its heroine were right. I don't know if I would have enjoyed it in high school. I had much less experience of pulp in any form and might have bounced off the three-way mash-up of horror, humor, and action, especially since I thought I disliked two of those genres for years. (I thought I disliked alcohol for years. It turned out what I disliked was the kinds of alcohol college students think is a good idea. So too with horror film and action movies.) I suspect I would have enjoyed Evie; nerd heroes are rare and female nerd heroes practically unicorns. I would have been very impressed by Anck-su-namun's costume, which I did not realize was primarily body paint until it smudged under Imhotep's hands. I would have liked Jonathan, but that is predictable: he is light-fingered and almost resolutely irresponsible, but not actually stupid—he bashes his way through hieroglyphs decently enough for magic and picks a plot-relevant pocket not once but three times in the film, each time with aplomb. I remember picking up the novelization in the Waldenbooks where I worked in the late '90's and early 2000's, but I don't remember anything about it except one stray line that evidently changed between shooting script and final cut. I haven't been able to get hold of Michael Almereyda's Trance/The Eternal (1998) and I wanted something with mummies even if they didn't come out of a bog. This excavation brought to you by my library-loving backers at Patreon.
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It's really the characters that sell it for me, and the performances thereof. I could basically watch Brendan Frasier do humorous pulp adventure all day; ditto Oded Fehr. Rachel Weisz has all these little touches that the camera doesn't even call attention to, like after O'Connell decks Jonathan to the ground in the prison and then she steps right over her brother's prone body to go on questioning him. Kevin O'Connor in pretty much every scene he's got ("your strength gives me strength," "something about bringing his dead girlfriend back to life," his fistful of religious amulets). There's just so much energy to everything -- as you say, it looks like they were genuinely having fun.
(On the topic of Imhotep's eyes: that was supposed to be part of why he mistook Evie for Anck-su-namun in their first encounter. But the story more or less ignores the question of his bad vision after that.)
In case you were contemplating watching the sequel: I don't think it's as good, but I do enjoy it. The script manages to pull off that thing Hollywood thinks is impossible, which is the married couple who protag together without some ham-handed attempt to inject romantic tension back into their relationship (OH MY GOD THEY'RE GONNA BREAK UP etc). It also has a kid protagonist who is, by the standards of such things, relatively non-obnoxious; he's believably the child of his parents and uses his brain, at least some of the time. It inverts a few things from the first film, which is a move I like when it's done reasonably well. So on the whole, not amazing, but also not total crap.
The third movie . . . would have been better as its own thing, rather than being tacked onto this series. Not abysmal, but not as good as the second, so nowhere near as good as the first. Though I give them props for finding an in-story reason to explain recasting Evie.
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*Akkadians in this movie’s universe seem to basically be Cimmerians, in that they’re tough but honest barbarian warriors who are virtually extinct.
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You know, I would totally watch Dwayne Johnson do sword and sorcery. Thank you.
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That sounds like my experience with Pacific Rim (2013): I didn't expect it to be crap, but I expected it to be big and dumb and fun and mostly we just needed to stare at something for a couple of hours and what we got was big and smart and fun and currently still my favorite Guillermo del Toro, Crimson Peak (2015) notwithstanding. I love when movies do that. I have to say, I think you got the better end of the deal with The Mummy than The Phantom Menace.
(Pitch Black is delightful. I've seen it twice now, liked it better the second time, suspect it will hold up to a third viewing.)
Rachel Weisz has all these little touches that the camera doesn't even call attention to, like after O'Connell decks Jonathan to the ground in the prison and then she steps right over her brother's prone body to go on questioning him.
Yes! I love that while she looks like the prim librarian archetype with her glasses and her shirtwaist dresses, she really isn't, even from the start. Librarian, yes. Prim, no. No one in the film is quite what they look like, which is why it works.
(On the topic of Imhotep's eyes: that was supposed to be part of why he mistook Evie for Anck-su-namun in their first encounter. But the story more or less ignores the question of his bad vision after that.)
Well, that was totally not clear. I just figured Evie was some kind of distant relative of Anck-su-namun's on her mother's side.
The script manages to pull off that thing Hollywood thinks is impossible, which is the married couple who protag together without some ham-handed attempt to inject romantic tension back into their relationship (OH MY GOD THEY'RE GONNA BREAK UP etc). It also has a kid protagonist who is, by the standards of such things, relatively non-obnoxious; he's believably the child of his parents and uses his brain, at least some of the time.
Though I give them props for finding an in-story reason to explain recasting Evie.
Since I don't expect ever to see it, may I ask? I can't imagine anyone but Rachel Weisz in the role.
The one thing I know about the plot of the second sequel is that it shifts the action from Egypt to China, which on some level leaves me sorry that all of the main characters—played by their original actors—did not simply star in a long-running series of international mummy movies, because there would have been so much scope for it. The Carnahan-O'Connells meet the Chinchorro mummies. The Carnahan-O'Connells meet the Pazyryk mummies. The Carnahan-O'Connells meet a bog body, albeit they just thought they were going to visit their father's cousins in Ireland. ("No, this didn't happen when Mother and Father took us for Christmas! Do they just follow us now?") I'm not surprised at the existence of the fandom; they are all characters you want more of.
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It's sounding like really entertaining commentary. I normally find commentary tracks distracting and would rather just read interviews or transcriptions, but I might have to give this one a try.
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Oh, we definitely did.
I love that while she looks like the prim librarian archetype with her glasses and her shirtwaist dresses, she really isn't, even from the start. Librarian, yes. Prim, no.
See also her enthusiastic description of the mummification process.
Since I don't expect ever to see it, may I ask? I can't imagine anyone but Rachel Weisz in the role.
I forget the exact setup, but it's something to the effect of a prologue-y bit which turns out to be Evie doing a public reading from a novel based on her life experiences. Somebody in the audience asks whether it's all true, and as she lowers the book/manuscript to say that it isn't all like it is in the story, you see the new actress. So basically it contextualizes Rachel Weisz as the "in-story" Evie.
which on some level leaves me sorry that all of the main characters—played by their original actors—did not simply star in a long-running series of international mummy movies, because there would have been so much scope for it. The Carnahan-O'Connells meet the Chinchorro mummies. The Carnahan-O'Connells meet the Pazyryk mummies. The Carnahan-O'Connells meet a bog body, albeit they just thought they were going to visit their father's cousins in Ireland. ("No, this didn't happen when Mother and Father took us for Christmas! Do they just follow us now?") I'm not surprised at the existence of the fandom; they are all characters you want more of.
. . . I may have just figured out one of my Yuletide requests.
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Okay, that is clever, even if Watsonianly I can't get behind it.
. . . I may have just figured out one of my Yuletide requests.
DO IT AND THEN SEND ME LINKS.
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If attributed, absolutely. Thank you for asking.
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I figured, honestly, but for my own sake I wanted to be clear.
Yay!
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Ha, me too. But I did love The Mummy when I saw it anyway, but given that I am/was a librarian... (Everyone else in the cinema laughed at the librarian line, except me. ;-D) And I still think I don't like horror or action, except when I do.
It is lovely fun, though, isn't it? It's hard not to forgive it pretty much anything, even when maybe I shouldn't. It isn't every summer you get a blockbuster that has a librarian heroine!
(The sequel isn't quite as glorious, but it does some interesting and fun things as well, rather than being a mere re-run. I've never dared see the third because I really don't see what the point is without Rachel Weisz as Evy.)
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It's a good thing to be proud of!
It is lovely fun, though, isn't it? It's hard not to forgive it pretty much anything, even when maybe I shouldn't. It isn't every summer you get a blockbuster that has a librarian heroine!
I can't think of many! I can't quite forgive it everything, but I can really like a lot. Also, Hollywood, please note that movies starring smart women rake it in at the box office already?
(The sequel isn't quite as glorious, but it does some interesting and fun things as well, rather than being a mere re-run. I've never dared see the third because I really don't see what the point is without Rachel Weisz as Evy.)
I'm already planning to watch the sequel: everything I hear about it makes a good case. I find myself kind of terminally disinterested in the third movie, because seriously.
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A lot of the effects probably aged better than some from around then because they didn't have a lot of money and tended to do a lot of practical stuff. (Partly because Vosloo had worked in pulps so long that he knew ALL the zero dollar shortcuts.)
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Sadly most everything else he has been in has sucked -- I mean, I liked the Resident Evil movies as fun brain candy, and there's an awful thriller where he and Alexander Siddig and Saad Siddiqui all menace each other, but there's the considerable hump of Joshua Jackson to get over. (After Fringe I have an anaphylactic reaction to that guy.) He was also in Covert Affairs with Sendhil Ramamurthy, but I didn't see that series. It's such a shame, he's gorgeous and a great actor.
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The production stories coming out of this movie are amazing.
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There are SO MANY OF THEM. The director telling Arnold Vosloo "I hope you don't have a weird-looking skull" right before they shaved his head. Vosloo wandering around in a tiny CGI-blue Speedo, which everyone assured him was necessary for the special effects. Somebody (I forget who) lighting Oded Fehr's hair on fire when they charged through a hallway with torches. It just keeps going.
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This is beautiful. I really don't listen to commentary tracks, but this instance s beginning to sound inescapable.
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The show was canceled, of course, and as far as I know is not available through conventional means. Mr. Salerno was friendly to the fans and actually got the network to show the last couple of eps rather than dropping it entirely--at two in the morning, but still, we got 'em...
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So noted. I will see if
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I have barely even heard of that. As in, I think I have heard the name. Say more?
It's such a shame, he's gorgeous and a great actor.
Yeah, he has just not been in anything else that I've seen or anything else that I think I would have sought out on my own. Dammit.
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(the black lead is Michael Ealy, playing the American Muslim undercover FBI agent hero) (who actually GETS to be heroic and is awesome)
The S1 credits are also neat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CxSexwwTXU
What also got me into the show is it has AMAZING music, both score and songs.
Oh yeah and there's my tag, altho I never did do a detailed writeup. http://kore.dreamwidth.org/tag/sleeper+cell
There's a playlist of both seasons here (DO NOT WATCH S2) for now https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmgcNIvG9XECl2L5Z7SW4UoyQdeEhJERr
It's not terribly violent, and it has a dark sarcastic sense of humour which really clicked with both me and T. It's very intense tho. Basically the American agent is trying to infiltrate a home-grown US sleeper cell, find out their big plans, and figure out how to try to stop them in time without blowing his cover. But it's a lot more diverse and thoughtful than most US shows.
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That is thoroughly understandable.
I think I noticed Rachel Weisz first in The Constant Gardener (2005), then really started paying attention to her after Agora (2009). She's been solidly on my radar ever since. The Mummy would definitely have done it sooner, though.
(His character was supposed to die, but everyone liked him so much that they just kept him around.
Hah! I was right! Good call. The only problem with Ardeth Bay is there isn't enough of him.
(Partly because Vosloo had worked in pulps so long that he knew ALL the zero dollar shortcuts.)
Oh, nice! I did notice that they used practical effects, which I always like in part because I find they hold up where the plausibility of CGI comes and goes, but I had no idea one of their stars was also an advisor.
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Like there was a scene where Imotep is supposed to pick Rick up by the throat and lift him in the air, and they're like, well we could put Brendan on a wire? And Vosloo said no you just put a box below the shot, and then Brendan steps up on it as I pretend to lift him. Things like that to do fight scenes on the cheap. I forget how they did the ghost summoning, but it was something similar.
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I have never heard of this movie, but if it is a showcase for Weisz, I should clearly check it out.
And Vosloo said no you just put a box below the shot, and then Brendan steps up on it as I pretend to lift him. Things like that to do fight scenes on the cheap. I forget how they did the ghost summoning, but it was something similar.
This delights me.
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It is totally worth not avoiding.
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Oh, neat. I didn't catch that.
and I’m positive that Jonathan exists as a character because someone looked at the flippant grad student who accidentally woke Imhotep the first time around and thought “let’s have that fellow survive through the whole movie instead.”
Well, I approve of that decision.
I do want to rewatch the 1932 movie now. I haven't seen it since high school.
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*wonders if there’s enough useful footage in Cards on the Table and Lawrence After Arabia to make a fan trailer for that (and which actress would’ve been a good Evie)*
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I know nothing about the process of vidding and can therefore offer no practical advice, but if you make it, I will watch it happily.
[edit] I understate a lot. I would really love to see this.
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*goes back to trying to convince Google that I want stuff set in the 20s not from the 20s*
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Did you ever? I had reason to revisit this post and suddenly remembered how much I still want to see this vid.
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I would probably notice the flaws and like the movies less if I rewatched the first two movies now but I was surprisingly oblivious to most race issues in 1999.
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It remains fun! And everyone involved is improbably good-looking! I include John Hannah even if I'm not sure I was supposed to.
I would probably notice the flaws and like the movies less if I rewatched the first two movies now but I was surprisingly oblivious to most race issues in 1999.
That's really the major flaw in the movie for me and it's frustrating because it was totally avoidable; I don't know why it wasn't caught or, if it was, why nobody on the production side listened. The script's idea of ancient Egypt might as well almost be Atlantis, but I survived that with the Etruscans: it was not the part of the pulp fantasy that broke my belief.
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Apparently Brendan Fraser really was choking during the hanging scene, which is interesting given how he makes it look goofy and over the top. I'm always amused by how much of a good time the extras are having in that one.
And now every time I see Arnold Vosloo in something else he looks weird with hair!
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I am getting the strong impression I should listen to the commentary, which is not usually how I feel about movies.
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It's on my list. Everyone including
Apparently Brendan Fraser really was choking during the hanging scene, which is interesting given how he makes it look goofy and over the top.
That happened to Billy Haines while filming Way Out West (1930)! Maybe hanging stunts are just not a thing people should do.
And now every time I see Arnold Vosloo in something else he looks weird with hair!
Understood. I have seen photographs of Yul Brynner with hair and he is still very beautiful, but it's still confusing.
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That sentence makes me smile. What a dream come true, right? To have an adventure with a really special someone, or, conversely, to discover a really special someone, and then have an adventure with them.
but whenever he's more or less human, he is as intense and solemn as if he's starring in a romantic tragedy, not a monster movie, which from his perspective is true enough. --well pointed out!
Everybody gets at least one moment of pure heroism and one moment of pure comedy and sometimes they're the same thing. Nice!
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Everyone is telling me that the sequel is just as good on this front, too, and with the much rarer pairing of a happily married couple. I don't think of romantic adventure as a genre that is very common anymore, but The Mummy is a really good example and proof that it can still be done well. Now I might want more.
--well pointed out!
Thank you! I think it was one of the tonal things that kept the movie from flanging off into pure silliness and I really liked it.
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It was, in fact, in Cairo; I studied abroad there in my junior year of undergrad, in 2002, so The Mummy was out on dvd at that point. The Egyptology Club held a showing of it. (I was not in that club, but I was taking a hieroglyphic class and an Intro to Egyptology class because duh, so I came to the showing all the same.) The movie opened on that scene of the pyramids at Giza, with a subtitle saying Thebes, and the entire room sputtered in unison.
Obviously, this is not the point of the movie. If anything, the movie flung itself gleefully away from accuracy; why else have five canopic jars, not for a plot point, but just as a throwaway wait-did-they-just as the camera pans past? But it was a hilarious and memorable experience. At the end they had a quiz on a chosen handful of inaccuracies, and everyone who got them all right had their names put in a hat. I was one of the three who won a (blatantly bootleg) copy of the movie.
Part of me would like to see it again, to try to focus more on things like Evie's awesomeness and the gleeful pulp -- a lot of people I know imprinted very much on Evie the defiantly adventurous librarian! But it's entirely possible that I would get caught up on the sputtering once again. I do have a better appreciation of pulp and other deliberately inaccurate genres nowadays, though. (Though the racism sounds like an entirely unnecessary kick in the teeth, ugh.)
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That's magnificent.
Part of me would like to see it again, to try to focus more on things like Evie's awesomeness and the gleeful pulp -- a lot of people I know imprinted very much on Evie the defiantly adventurous librarian! But it's entirely possible that I would get caught up on the sputtering once again.
I'm not judging. I watched Troy (2004) exactly once just so I knew how bad the popular reception of the Iliad was about to get and I've never been able to do it again.
(Though the racism sounds like an entirely unnecessary kick in the teeth, ugh.)
It is the one part of the movie I would just delete. Everything else, if you can accept that the film's Egypt is not really the historical one, worked for me.
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I am so happy to learn this about astronomers and geologists.
Years ago I watched a double feature of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) with a mixed group of classicists and medievalists. In hindsight of the director's cut, it turns out that Kingdom of Heaven is actually quite good and most of the incoherence was the result of the theatrical cut deleting key narrative tissue. We watched the director's cut of Alexander. There was no help there.
I am totally necro'ing this comment
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Send help, I just pictured Siddig El Fadil as Jonathan and now I am wistful.
This is an amazing, perfect idea.
I also wanted to mention this excellent fanfic from Yuletide a few years ago. It's all about Anck-su-Namun as a living woman and so quite tangential to the movie itself, but well worth reading.
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I was open to the sequel at the time when I wrote this post, but have been thoroughly persuaded of its value in comments. No matter how clunky the rest of the movie is, heroic married couples in love are a rare and valuable thing and I am all for seeing more of them.
This is an amazing, perfect idea.
I also accept photosets.
I also wanted to mention this excellent fanfic from Yuletide a few years ago. It's all about Anck-su-Namun as a living woman and so quite tangential to the movie itself, but well worth reading.
That is excellent; thank you for the pointer. I have given it kudos.
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You will be unsurprised to know that it has generated some really delightful fanfic, particularly of the Ardeth/Evie/Rick variety.
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I really did. It was exactly what I needed to be watching that night, but I strongly suspect I would have enjoyed it on any night I chose.
You will be unsurprised to know that it has generated some really delightful fanfic, particularly of the Ardeth/Evie/Rick variety.
I am already falling into the archives of AO3, with helpful pointers to FFN. I do not think I have ever before seen a fandom where the juggernaut ship is the canon het pairing (with some elaborations that I agree with) and I love that it's possible and yields such good work. I am a little bewildered that this film came out of Hollywood, is what I think I'm saying, but really very glad it did.
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I wonder if someone could do a recut without the racism, since it sounds entirely avoidable rather than frustratingly pervasive.
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I can watch a lot more horror movies now than I could in 1999, but I suspect this one would still be at the top of the so damn much fun list. I really want to see it on a big screen now.
I wonder if someone could do a recut without the racism, since it sounds entirely avoidable rather than frustratingly pervasive.
I bet someone could at least cut out some of the egregious jokes, since they have no plot importance and do not take place intermixed with necessary dialogue. The warden's portrayal overall is annoyingly woven into some important scenes. Stephen Sommers, seriously.
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If it helps, you are not the only person to have had this thought:
http://lemonsharks.tumblr.com/post/164568185593/thebluemeany-jkthinkythoughts-star-anise
(Have not seen the movie but remembered having seen this post.)
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Well, if the screenwriter did not intend that reading, I'm glad to know it's not just me.
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(Uh, hi. I wandered over from
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You're very welcome! That's a really wonderful thing to hear. I went into the first one hoping it would be fun; it feels like an incredible bonus that it also turned out to be good.
(For the record, while I am behind on writing up The Mummy Returns, I still hope to get to it this weekend, having been arrestingly derailed by Derek Jarman tonight.)
(Uh, hi. I wandered over from lost_spook's journal after I stumbled over her rec of your delightful Sapphire & Steel post while doing some Yuletide-related backreading... *waves*)
Pleased to meet you! You have an excellent icon.
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I KNOW RIGHT. *flappy hands* :D I avoided it for the longest time because my librarian friends love Evie so much, and I was worried that I wouldn't, or that she'd be the only good thing in a shite movie. Neither of which happened, so. ^_^
(I wound up enjoying the second one more, because dear god the first one has a lot of bugs. But they're both delightful. :D)
'You have an excellent icon.'
Aww, thanks! :D Spook made it. Yours is pretty awesome, too. ^_^
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I am really happy to keep hearing that librarians love her. That is successful representation.
I wound up enjoying the second one more, because dear god the first one has a lot of bugs. But they're both delightful.
The second had more bugs than I was expecting, even knowing the secondary villain was named the Scorpion King. I conclude that Stephen Sommers himself is really bothered by insects, because when he needs something really horrifying to happen to someone, all of a sudden there's chitin all over the screen.
Yours is pretty awesome, too.
Thank you! It was a present years ago from
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That does seem plausible. :-)
Leslie Howard is my wistful Peter Wimsey fancast.
Because he would have been amazing. Damn, now I'm sad. :S
(I have just enough face-blindness that I can't generally come up with fancasts of my own, but when I see one I like, it sticks with me. I was poking through some of your older entries earlier and saw a suggestion of Peter Cushing as Andrew Ketterley, and god DAMN. :D)
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It occurred to me in 2005 or so and I have been sad since! I liked Edward Petherbridge when I saw him, but I thought of Howard first. He's an important actor for me.
I was poking through some of your older entries earlier and saw a suggestion of Peter Cushing as Andrew Ketterley, and god DAMN.
Thank you! I don't often fancast, so I am glad that it works for people who aren't me. Very rarely it rises to the level of including pictures. I made a photoset for a book once and it took forever.