Category Archives: Movies

When I watched Captain Blood a couple of weeks back, I discovered my recorded-off-air DVD had the ending missing. No big deal — I’ve seen it enough times to remember how it turns out — but when I discovered my library had the authorized DVD I checked it out to catch the ending anyway.

I got a pleasant surprise: the special features included a “Warner Brothers Night at the Movies” designed to give viewers the feeling for what they might have seen if they’d caught Captain Blood in the theaters. Back in those days, as Leonard Maltin explains in the introduction, you got much more entertainment than just the film and the previews, though the collection does start out with a preview for Warner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“James Cagney in the role of his career!”).

Then came the newsreel; back in the 1930s, this was the only way to see live news footage of current events. And if you think “if it bleeds, it leads” is new, this led off with Bruno Hauptmann being sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing Charles Lindbergh’s baby; Helena Montana has been hammered by an earthquake; “dust storms bury Kansas and Colorado farms” as the Dust Bowl grows; and beloved humorist Will Rogers dies in a plane crash. We also have FDR assuring America the US will continue staying out of European affairs. I notice this shows FDR standing at the podium, which seems to confirm what I’ve read about the White House making him look less disabled than he was.

Then comes a short, All-American Drawback, with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charley McCarthy. Bergen, playing a football coach, learns Charley’s going to be pulled from his starring role on the team unless he can raise his grades; while having Charley play sports seems like an odd premise for a film centered on a ventriloquist’s dummy, this was entertaining enough. “I think it’s a shame they piled on Charley like that — if they wanted the ball so bad, why didn’t they ask for it?”

Johnny Green and his Orchestra was a musical short in which a spontaneous jam session not only inspires Young Love but sets three local farmhands to dancing and singing some hillbilly music. TYG, catching this in passing, was much amused by how overdone the conductor’s baton movements were; I’m guessing they were exaggerated for the camera, much as sword fights require larger blade movements than a real fencing match.

The final entertainment was Billboard Frolics, a cartoon in which various billboard advertising characters come to life: a Cuban dancer on a travel poster, penguins on a cigarette ad and a chicken who then has to run from a real-life cat. As Maltin says, more cute and whimsical than the zany cartoons best remembered from the era.

All they needed was a movie serial chapter to finish it off.

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One of my fellow Atomic Junk Shop bloggers ranked THE LEGEND OF TARZAN (2016) as the Tarzan movie he’s always dreamed of; after watching it, I can see why. It really is that good — a film made by people who get the books, but also get why they’re problematic in some ways.

It’s the late 1800s and Alexander Skarsgard and Margot Robbie are living in London as John Clayton, Lord Graystoke (“I’m not ‘Tarzan.'”) and his wife Jane Clayton. American ex-Buffalo Soldier George Washington Williams convinces Clayton to accept a mission from the British government investigating King Leopold II’s schemes in the Belgian Congo. At the time, the Congo was Leopold’s personal colony (as opposed to the property of his country) and it set new standards for how brutal imperialism could get.

Clayton and Williams go off to investigate but Jane insists on coming too. They come up against Leon Rom (Christopher Waltz), Leopold’s ruthless agent, who plans to build a military presence in the Congo that will eliminate any threat of rebellion (Rom was indeed a very nasty piece of work). Rom needs Tarzan — in return for delivering the ape-man to a tribe with a grudge, Rom will get the diamonds of Opar (here just a place, rather than the lost Atlantean colony of the novels) which will finance the military occupation. He’d rather not use Jane as bait — he’s got the instincts of a European gentleman — but that’s how things turn out so he rolls with it. Jane is largely unfazed: Rom has mercenaries and modern weapons but Jane knows the odds are against him, even if he doesn’t see it.

I recommend Greg’s post at AJS because I’d just repeat his points about why this works. Suffice to say it’s a good script, a great cast and a solid story — that, like John Carter, didn’t spark the series it should have. “An ordinary man will do the impossible to save the woman he loves — and my husband is no ordinary man.”

TYG wanted to watch something light this weekend so she picked JURASSIC WORLD: Rebirth (2025), the first film in this series I’ve watched since the original Jurassic Park. Somewhere between the two, dinosaurs got out into the wider world … and now they’re dying, except for a few areas of the tropics (I presume this is some sort of reboot to lay the groundwork for future films). Mercenary Scarlett Johansson agrees to visit one island where the creatures are still thriving, with an eye to collecting DNA from three giant reptiles to create a cure for heart disease (jungle quests for miracle cures go back to the 1940s at least). Of course they have to survive all the hostile creatures to pull that off, and then they get saddled with a family (one father, two girls, one girl’s boyfriend) stranded by a seagoing dinosaur attack. Worse, it turns out this is the island where genetic experiments that were too freaky for Jurassic Park got left to die — or breed …

It’s standard stuff but TYG and I weren’t looking for deep thought and we got what we paid for. On the down side I don’t think the opening sequence adds anything (or even relates to the rest of the film) and while the gene-engineered dinosaur of the climax is impressive — like the one in the image to the right, it can crush a modern vehicle in its jaw — the island seems otherwise occupied by standard issue saurians (I’m guessing this is also laying the ground for a future film). Still, we had fun — and I’m amused TYG recognized more of the cast than I did, knowing them from Bridgerton and Game of Thrones. “How would I deal with a genetically engineered dinosaur in the accounting ledgers? That’s not the right question!”

Covers by Jack Kirby and Ross Andru (top, bottom). All rights to images remain with current holders.

I expect a swasbuckling pirate movie to center on pirate adventure and swordplay. By that standard CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935) is a very odd swashbuckler, though it’s still a classic one.

Like the book it’s based on, the film takes it’s time getting to the piracy. We have Peter Blood (Errol Flynn) treatting a man injured during an uprising against James II; this is enough to get him condemned to death, then generously spared to become slave labor in the Barbados. The first half of the film covers all that, his success treating the governor for gout and his determination to exploit his position to free not only himself but his enslaved friends. It takes an hour to get to the piracy but it isn’t boring and Flynn, who’d previously appeared in a handful of “quota quickies” (films Warner Brothers shot in England to meet British legal requirements), is marvelous.

Olivia deHaviland shines as Arabella, who buys Blood in the slave market to keep him from going to the mines. She expects gratitude; he can’t show that to someone who owns him. Arabella has more agency than I remembered: not only does she save Peter Blood, when she spots him setting up his escape, she covers for him. It’s as entertaining as I remember it (it was watching this film as a tween that first got me hooked on movies); with Lionel Atwill as Blood’s nemesis and Basil Rathbone as a less ethical pirate. “If I’m not a physician, how do I know you’re a dying man?”

Wes Anderson films can be hit or miss with me but THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME (2025) was definitely a hit. It’s the late 1950s and corporate tycoon Benicio del Toro wants to create a massive hydroelectric industrial complex in the Middle East. Bringing his daughter, a pipe-smoking nun, along with him, he tries to nail down the last partnerships required for success, while dodging assassins. The plot makes no sense but I don’t watch Wes Anderson for a cohesive story; the bizarre set pieces are entertaining and the cast includes Michael Cera as an entomology-obsessed spy, Scarlett Johanssen as a businesswoman, Tom Hanks as a businessman with a knack for basketball, and Richard Ayouade as a very Che-looking revolutionary. “It’s a vestigial organ. I tried pushing it back inside.”

Aren (Justice Smith), a young black artist discovers THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES (2024) which fixes white people’s lives on the principle happier white people are less likely to kill them. Roger (David Alan Grier), his mentor in the society, leads Aren to his first assignment, helping a social media design guy deliver the project he’s struggling to complete — but then the mission requires Aren also give up his dream girl (An-Li Bogan). Can he do his duty?

This has some excellent moments such as parodies of The Green Mile and Legend of Bagger Vance. However it felt “off” to me in ways I couldn’t quite pin down — I think this review says it well, though. “We are constantly monitoring the happiness of every white person in America.”

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TYG in her teen years was a big fan of V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic novel and its sequels. Recently she bought a four-film set of the Lifetime adaptations and we watched the first film for a date.

In FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC (2014), Heather Graham plays Corrine Dollanger, a young mom in the 1950s, happy with her four kids, her successful white-collar husband and their comfortable suburban lifestyle … and then her husband dies. As Corrine explains to her kids, the Dollangers were living way beyond their means; now the only financial hope is to move across country with the kids to the creepy Southern Gothic mansion Corrine once called home.

This proves a bad idea. Corrine’s plan is to win back her father’s love, despite the disapproval of monstrous mom Ellen Burstyn; trouble is, the Dollanger parents were actually committing incest (niece/uncle — though the age difference was slight) — and Corrine will have zero chance of getting written back into the will if her father learns they had kids. The kids are locked up in the attic, only for a little while — and two years later they’re still there. I’ve got to admit this brew was better than I expected; while I’ve no great urge to read the book, I can see why it became a hit (I haven’t even mentioned the older children ending up incestuous). “Take off your blouse and show your children what I did when you disobeyed.”

PETALS IN THE WIND (2014) is much less Gothic and much less interesting. The three surviving Dollanger children, having escaped confinement, now cope with love, school bullying, abusive boyfriends and career aspirations while Mom and Grandmom finally have it out with each other. The main distinction in this dysfunctional family drama is iZOMBIE’s Rose McIvery stepping into the older sister’s role. “I much prefer sound effects.”

I caught the remaining two movies, IF THERE BE THORNS and SEEDS OF YESTERDAY (both 2015) while TYG watched them, but they were just a talking lamp. The two older kids now have a family of their own but when Corinne shows up, the younger son learns the truth about his roots … by and large, these were both closer to soap opera and a lot less distinctive.

PREDATOR: Killer of Killers (2025) is an animated film following Prey in setting its stories in the past. Predators take on a Viking woman and her son, two feuding samurai brothers and a Latino pilot in WW II, then the protagonists of all three segments get thawed out of suspended animation for an arena battle on the Predator homeworld. It’s fun, but nowhere near as cool as Prey was. “The leaves on a tree grow side by side — but when they fall, they fall alone.”

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