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Reviews
Child's Play (1972)
"Right Here in River City...."
When I was younger, this movie hit major cities but never made the small burg where I live. Beau Bridges was able to play young innocent roles then. I loved it most because the Catholic Church was playing host to., really, this wonderful horror movie. It was shot like many horror shows I've seen. Quality was as good as the Haunting of Hill House, a very high quality horror film of the early 60s. I was happy to see it just starting on Fox Movies channel when I arrived home tonight. I was riveted. Loved the give and take all the way to the end. But the end was a turnabout like a hundred similar turnabouts, with the obvious turned upside down by a revealing, riveting end piece. Yes, I wanted a surprise ending. But beyond that, as a lapsed Catholic since first grade, I enjoyed seeing the Church get what amounted to what in the seventies would've been an unfair bashing. I went to Catholic school for five years. I'd endured the enormous fear the Church sold then. Recent statements by Pope Francis and errant priest scandals in dioceses everywhere have brought home the realization that all Catholic dioceses in the world have been subject to priests taking up with children, men, women, anyone walking, really. The Church in America is taking a steep dive in members as we speak because of the new understanding. The Church was founded in the First Century. Priests at first married. The Church divided into different branches, the new branches not part of the Roman Church. By the 4th century celibacy was becoming mandatory in the surviving Roman Church. But it didn't become uniform until the 11th century. Given the nature of human beings I think one can assume a great many priests began violating the celibacy rule immediately. Covering up scandals has likely been part of the duty of Catholic dioceses for centuries. The backdrop of a boys school run by the Church is not accidental in Child's Play. Schools run by men in the priesthood have inherently had great potential for scandal, whether driven by sexual scandal or something else.
North West Mounted Police (1940)
Clutzy De Mille Needed To Rewrite Entire Film as Setup For Coop
I just watched this movie for the first time. Coop made the Westerner for William Wyler, who had the script totally rewritten to accommodate Walter Brennan as Judge Roy Bean and Gary Cooper as Cole Harden. It was made the same year as this one, 1940. De Mille was a failed playwright who became something like a business partner to some very important nickelodeon owners in New York. They let him come west in 1913 and make the first film in Hollywood: The Squaw Man. De Mille was pretty much incompetent, but his films were nevertheless, often successful. The Westerner is arguably one of the funniest westerns ever made. Coop and Brennan were superb because the film was set up for them. De Mille tried to cut Northwest Mounted's script for Cooper, but Coop's lines didn't always fit in the square peg mounted police spectacle. That left Coop squirming to get the right grimace, wince or gulp, when the script just couldn't make room for it. The movie was close to good, but not quite. I just saw it on a downloaded DVD. I spotted Iron Eyes Cody as a young Indian in the cast, but note that he is not included in the IMDb cast. Perhaps someone wants to rectify that.
Bloom (2003)
Leopold Hard to Hear
Some of Leo Bloom may as well be in Gaelic, I simply can't divine what he's saying. I'm looking at this on a DVD with only Spanish subtitles. Ulysses is difficult enough reading. Having to try and divine the all important voice-over without captions is crazy. But I notice many artsy fartsy British Isles stuff comes to the US without subtitles. The idea is there's such a small market in the states for such DVDs that spending money on subtitles just whittles the already small profit, smaller.
The film has inspired me to go back and tackle the book again. I haven't read a line of it in 40 years. At a minimum I won't leave the book until I've read the entire Molly Bloom soliloquy. Its what Ulysses journeyed home to hear.