I’ve seen My Fair Lady (#91) on stage and screen and hated it both ways. Hated it enough that I won’t even review it here, other than to say it has the 2nd dumbest final line in all of moviedom. You’ve Got Mail has the number 1 honors.
Couldn’t find The Jazz Singer (#90), but I wasn’t sure I could get past my childhood Neil Diamond crush to give Al Jolson a fair shake, so I didn’t try too hard. Patton (#89) was checked out, and Easy Rider (#88) appeared to be outside my moral boundaries according to imdb.com. So I moved on to #87: Frankenstein.
My first experience with Frankenstein was a TV version of the 1994 version, directed by Kenneth Branagh. Quite gory, and super scary. I figured the 1931 original would be less gory, and less scary. I was right.
The element of film I missed the most out of this version was the lack of a score. Film today uses music to tell us the story: when to laugh, when to be scared, when to cry. I made the mistake of organizing my scrapbooking materials for tomorrow while watching the movie. Without music to tell me what was going on, I missed a lot of the story.
Again, I continue to be surprised by the timelessness of the screenplays of these older films. So often I pass by older films, thinking the language will be so different that I won’t connect with the characters. This just isn’t true in most cases, I’m discovering.
I did see Star Wars: Episode III over the weekend. A couple of things bothered me, thematically and developmentally, but I’m sure everyone has an opinion on what should have been done with that story. I suppose if I had as much money as George Lucas does, I’d have the same attitude he does when it comes to critics: my money, my movie. Nyah nyah.
Even so, it has become painfully obvious that George Lucas has absolutely no grasp of the concepts of flirting and banter. Many of the exchanges between Padme and Anakin caused me physical pain. Nevertheless, Yoda uttered the worst line of the movie (and perhaps of the year): “Not if anything to say about it, I have.” Ouch.
True, true…I could have grasped the tortured nature of Anakin and Padme’s relationship with an eighth of the screen time. Han and Leia they are not. But screenwriting has been my biggest gripe about the “new” set of episodes.