Dry Ice Factory

Guess I'm feeling my age these days, but it was a bit of shock to read that Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 40 this year. I'm not sure when exactly I saw it, but I remember it was at the Lancaster Mall in Salem, Oregon and that my sister drove me and my friend Don "the Glove" Palmer to the theater. We didn't sit with her, because, I guess, we were weird teenage boys. For weeks (probably months) afterward, we would walk through the halls of our high school chanting in fake Latin and hitting ourselves in the forehead with our textbooks. It's curious, in retrospect, that my sister was around to give us a ride, and it may indicate that we saw it during the summer. Don and I (and our friend Reid) already knew Monty Python from the TV show and maybe the albums.

File770.com has a trailer for "a brand new sing-a-long version of the movie will be shown in 500 UK theaters on October 14."

And in case you're wondering, I turn 55 this year myself, so I would have been 14 or 15 at the time.

A couple of weeks ago I posted my annual list of movies that I saw more than once in the theater. One thing that's changed since then is that I saw Into the Woods a third time, so it joins Grand Budapest Hotel and Snowpiercer as the 2014 films I saw three times in the theater. (I've also watched the American Playhouse production of the stage version of Into the Woods three times since July, and I've been listening to the original Broadway cast recording of the music practically nonstop, or at least in between listening to a La Scala recording of Puccini's Tosca with Maria Callas.)

I've already seen one film twice in the theater this year: Tsui Hark's The Taking of Tiger Mountain, which for me is his best film since Time and Tide.

I've started re-reading Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore's novel, Fury, which originally appeared under their Lawrence O'Donnell byline, and I've been reminded that it's something of a sequel to a novella called "Clash by Night," which I've never read. It seems to be the case that they've never been published together in a single volume, but I just googled those two titles to double-check. The results reminded me that Fritz Lang directed movies called Fury and Clash by Night. Neither of those are amongst my favorite movies by Lang (despite the pairing of Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan in Clash by Night), and I'm left imagining Lang's adaptations of the Kuttner and Moore stories.

Fury is from 1947 and has a darkness and fatalism to it that certainly would have fit with Lang's style. It's set in vast cities called Keeps at the bottom of the Venusian ocean, and that makes me think of the subterranean workers city in Lang's Metropolis. There could be a celluloid fantasia in this, but I need to track down a copy of the Kuttner/Moore "Clash by Night".

The Iain Banks novel was published in 1992, and this four part, four hour mini-series was produced in 1996. The adaptation is pretty faithful to the book, although one of the changes is that it moves the "now" to circa 1994 from circa 1990. This is mostly noticeable in that the background war is in Bosnia rather than Kuwait, but some of the other cultural references are also updated, such as Prentice wearing a Nirvana t-shirt to his grandmother's funeral. (One of the reviews of the novel I read made the good point that it's an excellent time capsule of the era it was written in.)

Other changes are the elimination of Prentice's younger brother, James, who was an almost entirely peripheral character in the book. We (and Prentice) also regularly see the ghost of Uncle Rory (played by none other than Peter Capaldi), and I guess that was done to replace the bits of Rory's writing that Prentice reads in the book. Those bits of writing are still in the story, but we don't get as much of them as we do in the book (where we read whole sections of it, although we don't know that until near the end). In the TV show Rory speaks to Prentice, urging him on. Which brings up perhaps the major change from the book: the mystery of Rory's disappearance is the center of the story from the beginning. The TV show is essentially a murder mystery, with moody Hitchcockian music over the opening credits. In the book the murder mystery only slowly emerges, and the genre of the story as a whole is more of a coming-of-age story crossed with a family saga. In the series those elements are subservient to the murder mystery.

If the TV show improves on the book at all, it's by making the story more focused. It feels less baggy than the book. Nonetheless the story is essentially the same, and I had some of the same problems with it. Most of all, I still found Prentice a not very interesting character, which is a fatal thing in a protagonist. His father, Kenneth, for example, is a much more fascinating figure, as is, for that matter, the eventual love interest, Ashley, who is a smart woman working in the tech industry in the early days of the internet. What kind of shit does *she* have to deal with? But I will say that I thought all the casting was great, and it was cool to see the novel's many characters embodied and played. Sometimes I had a hard time understanding the Scottish accents, but listening to the voices did fill me with the desire to return to Scotland and just putter about the countryside for a while, stopping to taste the single malt along the way. So I guess it works as a travel brochure at the very least.

I've posted some thoughts about the movies I watched in 2013 in the theater and at home. Not a Best Of so much as a Most Of.

I don't go to Vanguard parties much anymore, but on Saturday it was at janeehawkins's, which of course is a nostalgia trip for those of us of a certain age. So I put on my Vanguard disguise (a.k.a. the clothes I'd been wearing all day) and headed on over. Amongst other things, it allowed me to return the DVD of Jerry Springer: The Opera that I had borrowed from roadnotes (thanks again, it was brilliant!), and to bring some of jimtrash's Tiny TAFFzines and some TAFF ballots, which Jane had promised to flog because she was so entertained by the Tiny TAFFzines I had mailed to her. It was a pretty small party, with many notable figures Missing In Action (no Jerry & Suzle, no Andy and Carrie, no Ulrika and Hal), but I guess that's not unusual these days. Although Frank (of Frank & Molly) said that the last one they hosted was quite a bit bigger, so I guess it still waxes and wanes. Jane had just taken a course in soldering at a maker space on Capitol Hill and has become fascinated with the 3D printers on offer there, so she showed some videos of the printers in action and showed off a few objects that had been printed on them. Very cool! At some point five of us retired downstairs to smoke a little smoke. There was a time when the smoking room would have been full of people madly puffing away on various smokables, but that would have been a time when I still smoked cigarettes, which I don't really miss. Actually I don't remember seeing Jane smoke any tobacco this time, so now I wonder whether she's quit too. Well, it was great to chat with kate_schaefer and jackwilliambell just like old times, and there was John D. Berry and Vonda McIntyre and a number of other familiar faces, as well as one new person who came with Janice Murray but left before I got a chance to talk to her.

So that was the old tradition, and a very pleasant tradition it was. On the new front, I have now walked to SIFF Uptown in Lower Queen Anne three times on the weekend to see a movie. It's about three miles from our house and takes me an hour. So far I've always walked there via Westlake and Mercer (always running into a crowd entering or leaving the opera house), then I return home by climbing up and over Queen Anne on Queen Anne Avenue, with a stop at the Hilltop Ale House for a pint and a shot of Crown Royal along the way. The last two times I've done this, I've gotten to the area early enough to eat something in one of the restaurants near the theater, have a coffee at Uptown Espresso, and read a book. Yesterday I was reading Diana Wynne Jones' Hexwood, which is certainly weird and intriguing and very meta so far. The movie I saw was Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, which was the one 3D movie he made and was being shown in that format. Anyway, this new tradition is a fine thing, and I hope I can continue with it, although it depends on SIFF continuing to show movies I want to see. They've been on quite a roll lately. I can't remember how long ago SIFF acquired the Uptown, but they are really turning it into something special for film freaks. One nice thing about this new tradition is I've gotten to know both Lower and Upper Queen Anne quite a bit better than before. The upper parts have always seemed like an island on top of the world, isolated from the rest of the city because you never go through it on the way to anywhere else. Never say never, because now I've found a reason to pass through and to stop at the local watering hole to read a few pages and observe the local wildlife. All in the service of getting more walking in and thus maintaining some semblance of health. Life is good.

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

(Via DVDBeaver.)