tom thumb

I enjoyed a wonderful fantasy film from 1958 called “tom thumb.”  This title, left uncapitalized, stars Russ Tamblyn as the title character and Terry-Thomas and Peter Sellers as the villains who trick Tom into burglarizing the village treasury.  Alan Young,  better known as Wilber on Mister Ed, helps Tom capture the crooks just as the lasher prepares to flog his parents for the crime.

They must have watched this movie at Pixar before they made “Toy Story.”  The toys in tom thumb seem very similar to the Toy Story toys in the way they move, although they are not at all neurotic.  They remain happy and do not seem capable of sadness.  Only tom sees the toys come to life, and he not only dances with them but helps solve problems with them — especially a toy named Con-Fu-Shon, a Chinese doll who bangs a gong.  At one point, Con-Fu-Shon suggests getting the Jack-in-the-box to open the bedroom door, which provides a nice animated trick.
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We only see one close-up of Russ Tamblyn as Tom Thumb.  That’s because the illusion of his smallness demands he be filmed from above against large props.  But he’s certainly a lot larger than a thumb and probably about the size of a hand.  The camera angles reminded me of a TV show that aired in the late 1960s called “Land of the Giants.”  However, the film creates no suspense around Tom’s smallness, although he does inevitably get lost in the forest.  Even though magical things could come to his rescue, he uses his ingenuity and resolve to save the day.

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The Artist Film

In “Lust for Life,” Vincent Minnelli’s 1956 film about Vincent Van Gogh, Kirk Douglas gives a solid performance as the troubled painter, whose unstable mental condition provides the basis for the plot.  He starts out as preacher sent to a desolate coal mining area, where he ends up living a squalid existence in a filthy room.  His brother Theo comes to his rescue, and takes him back to Holland, where Vincent discovers his passion for drawing and painting.

Movies about artists like to portray a tortured existence, as shown in 2 other artist movies — “Moulin Rouge,” a 1952 John Huston film about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and “Pollock,” a 2000 film about Jackson Pollock.  Films about artists should be set in France, so Moulin Rouge and Lust for Life work better for me than Pollock.  Minnelli spent a great deal of time showing the scenes that Van Gogh painted.  We see paintings in Pollock too, but since he painted abstracts, we don’t have a visual connection to what he saw.  Michael Powell’s “Age of Consent,” from 1969, which stars James Mason as an older artist dealing with his relationship with a teenage model, is less about art than about the coming of age of a young girl (Helen Mirren).

This will not only act as the factors on the basis of which you can establish contact with your preferred point in any condition and at cialis 100mg tablets any point of time. What is the Best Option for Treating prostate order generic levitra http://twomeyautoworks.com/?attachment_id=251 cancer involves using therapy to stop the body’s production of testosterone. The improper blood supply leads an individual to erectile dysfunction. discount cialis http://twomeyautoworks.com/item-8917 This problem also occurs buy cialis tablets when the ejaculatory system fails to reach the penis. Lust for Life provides lots of philosophical discussions about painting styles, especially between Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn, who plays Paul Gauguin.  Other famous painters in the vibrant painting scene of Paris in the 1880s appear in the movie too, and Van Gogh talks to all of them.  The director had access to Van Gogh’s paintings and shows the transition from the actual landscape to the finished painting.  This helps us understand Van Gogh’s passion for the visual world.

Since painting is a solitary practice, the drama only exists in this film because of Van Gogh’s mental illnesses.  I wonder if a film could be made of another influential and eccentric painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder.  Ryder, although a loner, gained fame and sold many paintings in his lifetime.   That’s not as interesting as Van Gogh, who fought through poverty and mental illness to master his art.

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Italian Silent Festival

I want to spend the first 10 days of October 2011 in Pordenone, Italy, to see the 30th Pordenone Silent Film Festival.  Us fans of silent film wait eagerly for the posting of the program, as I do every year for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival July event.  So far, no program appears on the Pordenone festival website — at http://www.giornatedelcinemamuto.it

However, they promise to show “The Wind,” the wonderful Lillian Gish film directed by Victor Seastrom in 1928.  I saw this film in 2009 at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival — what a treat!  I can still hear the sound of the vintage manual wind machines (hand cranked!) set up in the Castro Theater in San Francisco for the event.
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Pordenone lies about 100 kilometers north of Venice, which is not too far off the beaten path.  The continuing commitment to silent film of festivals like Perdenone, San Francisco (www.silentfilm.org), Kansas (http://www.kssilentfilmfest.org) and other places does so much to encourage the preservation of silent films.  They say 75% of these films are lost.   I already attend both the winter and summer events of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival every year.  My goal is to attend the Pordenone events and write about it here.  I love the extended format of the Pordenone festival, which enhances the artistic discussion and scholarship of silent era films.

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Country vs. City

When I watch films like “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,” (1948) and “The Egg and I,” (1947), I’m reminded of a lost world where there once existed a major difference between people from the city and people from the country.  Hollywood made many films like these in the old days.  Sophisticated met unsophisticated and Hollywood made comedy from it.  In the years since the 1950s, American farmers still till the land, but they put their feet up in front of the TV set after a hard days work.  Cowboys know all the songs on the radio, and humble fisherman rely on the latest technology to find their schools of fish.

Judy Holiday came to New York in “It Should Happen to You” (1954) to flummox Madison Avenue, whose admen are powerless to her logic.  In Billy Wilder’s “The Major and the Minor” from 1942, Ginger Rogers leaves New York in disgust and impersonates a 12 year old girl to get a cheap ticket on the train.  I can’t imagine modern audiences suspending disbelief to this extent now, unless of course a movie involves either fantasy or absurdity.

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Everyone’s instant access to each other makes it harder to tell the fish out of water story. I fondly remember the classic film “My Man Godfrey” (1936), starring William Powell and Carole Lombard.  Powell plays a hobo who gets hired by Lombard as a butler.  I like how decrepit he is as a hobo, but how sophisticated he becomes once he puts on the butler’s outfit.  Powell’s charm and wit give this movie great appeal, but it made me wonder why a guy like that would live on a trash heap.

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A Life in the Circus

For a wonderful movie experience, get a copy of “Dumbo,” the terrific animated film from the Walt Disney Studios.  Today’s audiences don’t all think alike, but back in 1941 when Disney made this film, an almost universal feeling of uncertainty pervaded our country, with the prospects and reality of a war in Europe and in the Pacific.  Darker elements in a film during wartime give a perception of a morass that threatens to engulf us unless we make significant changes.  Maybe they didn’t feel that way in the animation room at Disney, but the level of illusion, shifting perception and strangeness in the pink elephant sequence left me feeling exposed to the elements of risk.

Dumbo concerns the problems of a baby elephant with gigantic ears, whose mother gets locked in a prison car, and whose fellow pachyderms shun him because of his ears.  The circus ring leader forces Dumbo to perform with the clowns, which further alienates him from the other elephants.  Suddenly, Timothy Q. Mouse appears and becomes Dumbo’s only friend.  After hearing the matron elephants  ridicule Dumbo’s ears, Timothy immediately endears himself to the audience by saying, “What’s the matter with his ears?  I don’t see nothin’ wrong with ’em.  I think they’re cute.”  And so, with that, Dumbo gets a personal life coach who teaches him how to fly.

After Dumbo and Timothy get drunk on some leftover champagne, the pink elephant sequence becomes a trip of LSD proportions – with shape shifting, marching, and color changing elephants.  The vignette causes a giddy uneasiness, and when the crow characters appear in the next scene, I get the sense that I’ve left the circus set forever.  But Dumbo was meant to soar, and anyway, his mom is still in the circus prison.  Timothy and the crows work everything out and at the end, and we see the circus train riding on to another town — with Dumbo, his Mom and Timothy now riding in first class.
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Dumbo possesses little personality, especially compared with Timothy, who sports a ringleader’s uniform, complete with epaulettes and a tall red cap.  Those rats in “Ratatouille” (2007) could learn a thing or two from this mouse – he’s kind, generous, sweet, and intelligent – and he understands the power of the unconscious mind and positive thinking.  In this film, he’s an agent, happy to be himself, but waiting for a star to latch onto.  One can learn a lot from a life in the circus.

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San Francisco Silent Film Festival

In a few weeks, on Saturday, February 14, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival holds its winter event at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.  The festival shows films from the silent era as they were meant to be seen, on the big screen in a beautiful vintage theater (the Castro was built in 1925) with live music accompaniment.

I began going to the festival only 4 years ago and I wish I knew about it earlier.  This is the sixth winter event, and the summer festival in July started 16 years ago.  I keep hearing about spectacular finds of lost silent films, and always look forward to the day I can see them at the festival. This is the main reason why older people and women find it more difficult to build muscles because of viagra sales the weightlifting program, it has to produce more testosterone as well as other growth hormones and this will help the user to stay safe and to prevent the adverse drug effects and to ensure the safe drug affectivity. I stopped to ask an elderly woman who was outside in her garden, and she said, “it’s right behind my house, you can come levitra sample through my garden, just leave your car right there.” I said my prayers, walked around, and after 20 minutes was ready to leave. You can cross check the women viagra australia credibility of the website before making any purchase from such sites. They have prescription free tadalafil the fear that someone known might come to know that these capsules can be taken by those under 18 years of age, or without knowing if medicine is what will solve the issue or not.  This year, the winter festival schedule includes some Charles Chaplin shorts and two feature films:  L’Argent (1928) and La Boheme (1926).   L’Argent, directed by Marcel L’Herbier, is adapted from an Emile Zola novel, runs 168 minutes, and concerns love and fraudulent business practices.  La Boheme, directed by King Vidor, stars Lillian Gish and is a love story about a playwright (John Gilbert) and a seamstress (Gish).  Edward Everette Horton plays a part in this 95 minute film.

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Japanese Wartime Film

After watching so many World War II American movies, I watched a Japanese wartime film called “The Most Beautiful”  (1944), about a group of women who join the war effort to make precision optic gunsights.  Since this is about what women do (movie-wise) when the men went off to war — which is to pack themselves off to some dangerous and cold factory with graphic scenes of dangerous moving machine parts — I expected to see a lots of wartime footage interspersed with the drama of letters from the front and whatnot.

However, this is a Akira Kurosawa film, which means the theme, action and plot never go astray from the central story.  The women continue to make bombsights and the managers continue to drum up ways to keep up morale.  We never see wartime footage.

One of the main themes of the movie includes how much the simple sport of volleyball — played by the girls at the factory as a management directed morale building exercise — helps productivity.  It reminded me of my own work experience.  During the day, I work at a bank, and my team gets together to play foosball.  As much as the bank tries to build morale in other ways, the foosball table seems to rule.  I’ve met more people as a result of playing foosball than as a result of any of the company directed “team building” programs.
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The “end of act 2 moment” in this film occurs when Tsuru Watanabe (played by Yoko Yaguchi) misplaces a bombsight lens, which has not been “calibrated” properly.  The other women in her team and the management are very concerned because one bad bombsight could mean an airplane could go down.  This forces her to stay up all night to find the lens, which means she must look at as many as 2000 lenses.  She finally finds the lens!

Have you ever seen the Michael Keaton film — “Gung Ho?”  Keaton decides to do the same thing as Watanabe.  He goes into the factory to build cars (not precision lenses) — by himself.  But since it’s not wartime, the movie makes the opposite point.  It’s not “do what you can, every person’s effort helps the country, you are slaving for a dead soldier.” Instead, it’s “Let’s band together and make something great.”  Both of those sentiments work during the wartime.  In Gung Ho, Keaton’s co-workers finally decide to join him to build cars.  But by 1944, in Japan, it was an individual effort.

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TCM Treasure

I tell everyone that if I was ever stranded on a desert island and could bring along only one television station, it would be Turner Classic Movies (TCM).  They offer consistently great programming for a movie buff, and they do it with class and sophistication.  At times, especially when they run their evenings featuring a certain star or director, I may watch as many as 5 movies in a row.  Over the years, TCM has significantly enriched my life as I’ve watched everything from the “Birth of a Nation” (1915) to “Shampoo” (1975) and even more recent films.

Robert Osborne, a great film historian, not only introduces the movies in the prime time hours, but interviews great stars such as Betty Hutton, Anthony Quinn, Jane Fonda, Liza Minelli and Mickey Rooney.  His questions and knowledge illuminate so much about the history, craft and personality of Hollywood film.  Tonight, for instance, Osborne treated us  with a recent interview of Louse Rainer, the 100-year old German actress (and oldest living Oscar winner) who contracted with Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer.  The outspoken actress didn’t care much for Paul Muni, and said Louis B. Meyer wanted her to sit on his lap.
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Sometimes, I don’t intend to watch a movie on TCM, but Osborne’s opening presentation intrigues me so much that I end up watching it anyway.  The station also continues to premier new titles.  I wrote my master’s thesis about Billy Wilder, but although I watched almost every Billy Wilder film, I still could not locate “Five Graves to Cairo,” which Wilder directed in 1943.  This taut and interesting war story, starring Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, and Erich von Stroheim — while not available on DVD — showed last year on TCM.  Thanks to Turner Classic Movies, I finally saw it and loved it.

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Indian Movies

I made an effort this year to watch some Bollywood flicks, and a few Tamil movies (aka Kollywood) too.  Like Hollywood, star power goes a long way in Indian cinema.  Take Shahrukh Khan, for example.  I attended the Regal Cinema in Mumbai during my trip to India last year.  It seemed like everybody showed up the night I went to see “Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi,” which means “marriages are made in heaven.”  It’s basically the Nutty Professor with Khan playing the Jerry Lewis part.  Nice story, good songs and 167 minutes long.  But people came in droves and I had to sit in the balcony.

Rajnikanth, the Tamil superstar of the last 2 decades, starred in “Padaiyappa,” made in 1999.  In this movie, he rejects a beautiful woman who seeks revenge at every turn.  I snapped a picture of billboard featuring him and a state politician that I spotted in Madurai, Tamil Nadu.  After I saw a couple of his films, I realized his considerable star power.

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Rajnikanth (Right)

The Kerala film industry in India, not to be outdone, calls itself “Mollywood.”  I remember one time in Kochi, I came across a horrific car wreck.  Falling back in horror, my female companion screamed and told a few movie cameramen, who seemed to be just standing around, to get an ambulance.  They explained that they were shooting a movie and the wreck was an elaborate special effect.  Upon inspection, we realized that the victim was a painted mannequin and that the wrecked car was a stage prop.

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Netflix Rules

Although Netflix continues to amaze me with their selection, I wonder sometimes why some classic movies don’t seem to be available.  My “Saved DVD” queue currently contains 35 titles, many of whom have been on the list for several years.  For instance, Satyajit Ray’s great Apu Trilogy — “Pather Panchali” (1955), “Aparajito” (1956), and “The World of Apu” (1959) remain unavailable.  Additional unavailable titles in my queue include “Tropic of Cancer” (1970), Ernst Lubitsch’s “That Uncertain Feeling” (1941), and “Greaser’s Palace” (1972).

Surprisingly, other films in my queue have not even made it to DVD, including Preston Sturges’ “The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Luna” (1979),  and “Ask Any Girl” (1959), which stars Shirley MacLaine and is categorized by Netflix as a classic comedy.  “Dumbo” (1941) is available on DVD; I can get it at the public library but not on Netflix.  I realize that Netflix must pay licensing fees, but as a classic movie fan, I feel sad that many Netflix titles remain unavailable.
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I noticed that titles usually appear on DVD after the movies broadcast on the Turner Classic Movies network.  That happened with the wonderful “I Love You Again” (1940), starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, and with Michael Powell’s “Age of Consent” (1969), starring James Mason and a luminous Helen Mirren.

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