Well… this week I killed myself 100 minutes sooner by watching James Whale and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein and Bride of
Frankenstein and Stephen Spielberg’s Duel. All three are great movies, so I think they
were probably worth the 44 minutes.
Bride is certainly an
amazing and film. The first Frankenstein is quite good, but the
sequel surpassed it… largely b/c Whale didn’t want to do a sequel, so to get
him to do it the studio gave him carte blanche.
He took it and ran w/ it. Bride slips an amazing amount of
sacrilege past the 1930s censors. There’s
plenty of religious imagery in it… but even the structure of the plot is an
inverted Passion Play: First the Monster is resurrected, then he’s crucified,
then imprisoned, then he eats a last supper where he says “Bread good! Wine
good!” Then he meets the
Mephisto-figure, Dr. Pretorius, who successfully tempts him by offering him a
wife. Pretorius offers the famous toast:
“To a new world of gods and monsters!”
For something a little more
recent, I traded 33 minutes of life expectancy to watch Duel. It’s a great thriller
built around the urban legend of a mad truck driver who runs down randomly
selected motorists. Midway through, the
protagonist utters a great bit of monologue:
“Well, you never know...you just never know. You just go along figuring some things don't change ever, like being able to drive on a public highway without someone trying to murder you. And then one stupid thing happens. Twenty, twenty-five minutes out of your whole life, and all the ropes that kept you hanging in there get cut loose, and it's like, there you are, right back in the jungle again.”
That’s the essence of the of the
Hitchcock-style thriller: the ordinary everyman suddenly finds the bottom falls
out of normal, predictable, civilized life… and you’re “back in the jungle
again.”
Duel I had to watch on my own
(this saving my Owner 33 minutes of her life).
Ma’am won’t watch that movie w/ me.
The Kitten once got hit by a semi – her car crushed between the semi and
a guard wall, totaled the car and cracked her sternum. She still tenses up when she drives next to a
semi (mild PTSD). So for her watching
Duel is, I guess, like guys who've seen combat watching a war movie. She watched once w/ me years ago and said,
never again!
Outside of the Halloween film fest... it's been warm enough to do some motorcycle riding, and I'm going to go out again today. Not sure how that effects my life expectancy... I'll try to avoid any mad truckers.
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