Category: Film Page 4 of 101

Teen/coming-of-age/1980s movies are often a hard sell for me, but John Hughes-penned ones have a bit of heart and tenderness that hit me in the right place, so I was hoping Some Kind of Wonderful, one of the few I’d missed up to this point, would fit the bill as well, and it pretty much did. I’m also one of the people who think Pretty in Pink would’ve been better if she’d ended up with Duckie, so if you’ve seen both films, you may guess how I felt about this one on that front.

Keith (Eric Stoltz) is a high school kid who cares more about art than college, and is kind of on the lower rung of the ladder at school in terms of social class – his family is working class, and he envies the more well-off kids from white-collar families. He’s best friends with a tomboyish girl, Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), but has eyes for Amanda (Lea Thompson), who runs with the posh crowd. Yes, this is turning into a love triangle.

Challenge Week 49: Love’s Enduring Promise

By Jandy

On December 13, 2016

In 2016 Movie Challenge

This is the (first) sequel to Love Comes Softly, so it was nice to see them so close together. And I was actually interested to see more of Marty and Clark’s story, even though the first movie tied it off pretty nicely.

This is mostly Missy’s story, though – the 9-year-old daughter from the first film. It’s now ten years later, and Missy is a schoolteacher (using those reading skills she learned from Marty in the first film) in the community’s one-room schoolhouse. And she’s played by January Jones, which strikes me now as pretty dumb casting, but I mean, Jones was very young here and didn’t have Mad Men baggage. I swear, she smiles more in ten minutes of this movie than she has in the entire corpus of other work I’ve seen her in. But still, she just seems VERY unlike the Missy of the earlier film – I can’t imagine that spitfire of a 9-year-old growing up into this dismissive and bland young woman.

Challenge Week 49: Love Comes Softly

By Jandy

On December 13, 2016

In 2016 Movie Challenge

I tend not to seek out Hallmark-type movies, but when on vacation with my cousins this year, they heard about my challenge and wanted to give me some movies, and this is what my cousin’s teenage daughter assigned me. I’m game for anything!

The pioneer setting helps a lot, as I was a big fan of the Little House books as a kid and stuff like that, plus I’m definitely a huge fan of westerns in general. Not necessarily a huge fan of Katherine Heigl, but thanks to a short-lived obsession with Grey’s Anatomy, I tend to want to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Challenge Week 48: Son of Frankenstein

By Jandy

On December 13, 2016

In 2016 Movie Challenge

True confession time. I have apparently seen this. I don’t know why I didn’t log it (either on Flickchart OR Letterboxd), and I was looking forward to it as a new-to-me Frankenstein film. But once it got going, things started to be familiar, and yeah, I’ve definitely seen it. But I love it, so since I hadn’t ranked it yet, I decided to go ahead and count it. I thought about just writing this as if I hadn’t seen it, but that felt dishonest and I also wasn’t sure I could manage not to let it slip. :p I also have The Ghost of Frankenstein and may watch it as an additional tag-along for Travis, but my guess is I’ll rank this one higher.

Anyway. To the movie. This is brilliant! Basil Rathbone is Dr. Frankenstein’s son, who brings his family to his father’s castle. He’s super-excited about it, though he rejects his father’s actions. The townsfolk aren’t nearly so excited about it, viewing his whole family with understandable suspicion. And sure enough, Frankenstein fils soon finds his father’s research, is convinced by it, then meets Ygor (Bela Lugosi!), who’s been keeping the Monster (Boris Karloff) hidden. Things escalate.

Challenge Week 48: Aelita: Queen of Mars

By Jandy

On December 12, 2016

In 2016 Movie Challenge

A silent Soviet science fiction flick? Sign me up for that! Actually, I’ve heard of Aelita before, but only in passing and I obviously didn’t go out of my way to find it. Definitely the kind of film I’ve been glad to see pop up on this challenge.

That said, it’s kind of like The Phantom Carriage a few weeks ago with regards to horror – it has a reputation for its science fiction elements (one of the earliest feature films to have any elements of sci-fi, even beating Metropolis out of the gate), but though they’re stunning and incredibly designed, they actually make up a fairly small proportion of the movie. Although you wouldn’t know this by looking at Google Images, as literally all the screencaps are from the Mars sections of the films.

Mostly it’s concerned with a bunch of Russian folks, various levels of civil servants, mostly. Los is an engineer obsessed with a strange transmission that he thinks may have come from Mars – the sci fi elements come from his imagination as he imagines Aelita and various other Martians watching earth through a giant telescope (and eventually, Aelita falling in love with him). He also becomes very jealous when he thinks his wife Natasha is flirting with another man, a petit bourgeousie thief, and their estrangement is the real pivot of the film. There’s also a plot with a wanna-be detective trying to find the thief and some impersonation and mistaken identity, but Los and Natasha are the emotional anchor.

Eventually, the earth and Mars storylines cross (or seem to, spoilers), and the Russians lead a revolt on Mars, because the elite Martians use a slave labor force that they put in cold storage when they don’t need them. The uprising seems like it could’ve been an influence on Metropolis in form, but it’s also very specifically Soviet, with a soldier character explaining the hammer and sickle in very propagandistic terms.

It’s a very interesting film, due to historical elements like that which place it at a specific point of time in Soviet cinema, and also the influences it seems to have had on world cinema. That said, it suffers from an uninvolving earthbound plot, and a lot of characters who were difficult (for me) to keep straight and remember their part in the plot. I watched it over two days, with lots of rewindings to remind myself who everyone was and what they were doing. So I’m glad I watched it and I found elements to appreciate, but it didn’t really grab or move me outside of historical curiosity.

Stats and stuff…

1924, USSR
directed by Yakov Protazanov, written by Aleksei Fajko and Fyodor Otsep
starring Yuliya Solntseva, Nikolai Tsereteli, Igor Ilyinsky, Nikolai Batalov

I’m ranking all my Challenge films on Flickchart (as I do all the films I see), a movie-ranking website that asks you to choose your favorite between two movies until it builds a ranked list of your favorites. Just for fun, I will average out the rankings and keep a running tally of whose recommendations rank the highest. When you add a film to Flickchart, it pits it against films already on your chart to see where it should fall. Here’s how Aelita: Queen of Mars entered my chart:

Aelita: Queen of Mars > Courage of Lassie
Aelita: Queen of Mars < Twin Warriors
Aelita: Queen of Mars < Manhattan Murder Mystery
Aelita: Queen of Mars > Barbarian Sound Studio
Aelita: Queen of Mars > Splendor in the Grass
Aelita: Queen of Mars > Spider-Man 2
Aelita: Queen of Mars > Knick Knack
Aelita: Queen of Mars > Babes in Arms
Aelita: Queen of Mars < Badlands
Aelita: Queen of Mars < Midnight
Aelita: Queen of Mars < Maytime
Aelita: Queen of Mars < Bunny Lake is Missing

Final #1414 out of 3732 (62%)

It is now my #1 Yakov Protazanov film, my #35 Fantasy Adventure, my #60 Silent Film, and my #6 film of 1924.

Aelita, Queen of Mars was recommended by Travis McClain, a friend from the Flickcharters group on Facebook.

Category: Film Page 4 of 101

Challenge Week 50: Some Kind of Wonderful

Challenge Week 49: Love’s Enduring Promise

Challenge Week 49: Love Comes Softly

Challenge Week 48: Son of Frankenstein

Challenge Week 48: Aelita: Queen of Mars

Stats and stuff…

A few more screenshots…