recent tracks:

A few movie comments mostly

Movies:

Lord of War is a fun no-brainer in which no character is likeable. The direction and acting are both quite good, but the story itself is too shallow to make for a movie worthy of unabashed praise. Incidentally the movie is the story of an international arms dealer.

Dracula was produced before film scoring was standard--amazing! In fact, the whole movie had the distinctive feel of actually being a play shot from different angles. The acting was more exaggerated than anything you'd see today (Bela Lugosi looked absolutely nuts, yet the other characters talked to him as if he were a charming fellow), the comic relief was more pronounced (and, frankly, unnecessary), the special effects were not terribly special (it was 1931 for crying out loud!), but there was great attention to detail--the sets were phenomenal, and the overall experience was that of seeing history, watching the creation of the movie as a medium as much as watching Dracula preying on poor Londoners. Pretty fascinating.

Dracula's Daughter was produced five years later. In the interim, the internet tells me, King King set a milestone in integrating film scores with the pictures themselves, and Dracula's Daughter follows suit with an exceptionally melodramatic score. The story is actually a bit more clearly laid out than in Dracula but the acting and comic relief follow the same sort of theatrical direction. I again got the feeling that I was observing the development of the cinematic medium, and that certainly trumped anything I could say about the movie itself, which I think I would have trouble rating as an individual movie, outside of its historical context.

This is pretty cool.

As always, more to follow sometime, but to class with me now.