Cleopatra, Sith, Death Proof
April 10th, 2007
Prompted by the grand finale of Rome, we took another look at Cleopatra, which is one of those movies I can rewatch every few years. Compare-and-contrast is a fun enough game, and Marcy, who was never entirely sure which of the HBO characters were fictional, was entertained by noting differences in motivation and plot. Every frame of Cleopatra must have cost more than an entire episode of Rome, but the storytelling is much more contemporary on HBO. The movie nearly bankrupted Fox because it was designed to trump TV by outspending it. Forty years later, it has been shown up by… a TV show. But the images are still twice as wide, and the characters twice as grand.
Here’s what fascinated me, though: the palatial sets, outlandish backdrops, and outsized drama of Cleopatra resemble another, much more recent epic about larger-than-life figures. Along with forties serials, The Hidden Fortress, Ray Harryhausen and all the other usual suspects, there is no doubt that the Cinemascope epics of the fifties and sixties, and specifically Cleopatra, served as a blueprint for the Star Wars films. Archetypes in ever-morphing hairdos and caped costumes acting out eternal tragedies and reciting awkward, overwritten lines of dialogue — especially Revenge of the Sith, the episode in which the galactic shit hits the fan, is the spiritual and cinematic heir of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s four-and-a-half-hour epic.
Read on for more about Star Wars, Grindhouse, and why Jar-Jar Binks is cooler than Stuntman Mike. Also, lots more screenshots.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
September 10th, 2006
Creature feature from 1953; essentially a remake of King Kong with nothing to recommend it but the early Harryhausen animation. Nukes unleash a rampaging dinosaur, nukes finish him off. The finale at Coney Island–the heroes ride the Cyclone in full Homer Simpson hazmat getup–is worth catching on late night TV sometime.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Eugène Lourié, 1953. **
[tags]ray harryhausen, ray bradbury, monster, dinosaur, new york, coney island, film, 2 stars[/tags]
