Hello! Lozzer here again! Just a quickie: I forgot to mention the other day my completely amazing theme tune. It's a proper earworm I don't mind telling you. Think BrodyQuest, but 70 years earlier than that cheeky upstart.
Free weekly rag ShortList, designed to pass exactly twenty minutes of the average citygoer's commute on a Thursday morning, is renowned for two things: inexplicably continuing to employ Danny Wallace, and captioning their photos with some of the worst "jokes" of all time. I won't pain you with examples save for one this week where a dramatic picture of the China oil spill fire (in which at least one person was killed and nearly 200 square miles of ocean became polluted) was tastefully captioned with the gag "I told them they shouldn't have cremated Higgins".
Its sister magazine Stylist, aimed squarely at the ladyperson end of the market, however, trumped its big brother this week in a Knight & Day wraparound which boasts some of the most awful captions ever printed.
They range from the mundanely informative:
Through the excruciatingly unfunny:
To the downright unfathomable:
In a bizarre twist, an almost identical piece of marketing fluff accompanies this week's ShortList, but the regular caption writer seems to have been given the day off, and instead somebody has helpfully annotated the pictures with the obvious ("Tom Cruise plays action man Roy Miller") and the unlikely ("The film is 'the perfect mix of adrenaline-fuelled action and quick-fire comedy'").
Sorry guys, the poster quotes have already been decided.
Hello! I'm Peter Lorre, the boggle-eyed, moon-faced sinister foreign bad guy from some of the greatest films ever made - Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Man Who Knew Too Much and many more. I was also in Fritz Lang's M, but that's a bit overrated to be honest.
I was just thinking that if you're at all bored or down in the dumps, maybe you'd like it if I entertained you for a few moments with my ridonkulous face?
I recently saw Tod Browning's 1931 version of Dracula at the Hackney Empire, with a live soundtrack performed by Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet, who sound more like a system of planets in an episode of Flash Gordon than an instrumental ensemble, but I can assure you they are in fact musicians. If they were planets they wouldn't have got through the door.
Philip Glass & The Kronos Quartet: The End Of Dracula
Ignoring for a moment the appalling view from the gallery seats that meant the top of the screen was obscured by the proscenium arch, the abysmal sound quality of the film which left the actors resembling a group of teenagers mumbling into a bean bag, and the volcanic heat of the uppermost reaches of the Hackney Empire on a summer's evening, the film was otherwise brilliant, although it does wrap itself up very suddenly and unsatisfactorily. It's as if the editor spilled his tea all over the last reel and just chucked most of it away hoping nobody would notice.
Glass's music is haunting and beautiful, and although it's already on the Dracula DVD it's amazing to hear it performed live. Or it would have been if the audience had shut their fat faces and stopped laughing all the way through. It's obviously necessary to include an addition to Dracula's title card for modern cinemagoers:
Listen. I will allow you a short, sharp exhalation through the nose the first time you see a rubber bat hanging from a piece of string. And you can smile to yourself once if you think Bela Lugosi's long stares into camera are a bit camp. But that's it. What you are ABSOLUTELY NOT ALLOWED to do is guffaw like a braying donkey every single time the bat appears or Dracula gives you his Blue Steel. It was 1931, alright? Show some respect.
If it's DracuLOLs you're after I would recommend instead Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, which contains two of the funniest performances of all time in Keanu Reeves' and Winona Ryder's unspeakably miscast English lovers. Their mangling of vowels and complete inability to concentrate on both their acting and their accents simultaneously is exemplary.
Having said that, Bram Stoker's Dracula is much better than I remembered from when I last saw it in 1992, not least in the costume department. Since reading Clothes On Film, the only movie blog better dressed than The Incredible Suit, I'm constantly aware of the clobber on show in films these days. Check out some of the schmutter that won costume designer Eiko Ishioka the Oscar:
I think my favourite outfit is Vlad's ludicrously impractical but bloody stylish suit of armour; although I notice it's since been ripped off for another legendary fictional character.
Tom Mankiewicz wrote or co-wrote some of the most average James Bond films. That might seem like a perfectly good reason to politely ignore his passing, but it meant that his Bonds (Diamonds Are Forever, Live And Let Die, The Man With The Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me) reached massive - and massively varied - audiences, ensuring the survival of the brand for years to come. His place in the history of 007 should be neither underestimated nor overlooked.
Mankiewicz was also responsible for reshaping a humungous and flabby Superman script into two classic films, thereby creating the template for superhero movies that can be found at the core of every blockbuster with the suffix -Man since. Except maybe Rain Man.
Combine all that with uncredited work on Gremlins, The Goonies and Batman and it's easy to see how Tom Mankiewicz has almost certainly touched the lives of every single person reading this blog.
Free weekly rag ShortList, designed to pass exactly twenty minutes of the average citygoer's commute on a Thursday morning, is renowned for two things: inexplicably continuing to employ Danny Wallace, and captioning their photos with some of the worst "jokes" of all time. I won't pain you with examples save for one this week where a dramatic picture of the China oil spill fire (in which at least one person was killed and nearly 200 square miles of ocean became polluted) was tastefully captioned with the gag "I told them they shouldn't have cremated Higgins".
