Do you happen to have a pair of birds that are… just friendly?
How many of you have ever looked up to see a large concentration of crows perched somewhere nearby and the first two words to come to your mind are Alfred Hitchcock? The director’s fourth and final adaptation of a Daphne Du Maurier work, as much as any Hitchcock film other than Psycho, has left a vivid and indeliable impression on the collective memory of film lovers.
Whatever walked there, walked alone.
Day three of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival
Somewhere along the way, Hollywood forgot how to tell a ghost story. It happened without much fanfare, so I can’t say when, but certainly the success of Halloween had something to do with it. That isn’t to begrudge John Carpenter his success, but it set the pattern for the modern horror film that has since calcified into rote repetition. Any form of psychological terror has been jettisoned in favor of a geek show spectacle of masked super-killers leaping out of the shadows to disembowel horny teenagers.
The emergence of the PG-13 horror film recent years, much be-moaned by the gore-hounds, has restored some of my hope that the traditional ghost story might make a comeback. However, except for The Others, The Sixth Sense and possibly The Ring, there hasn’t been much to cheer about in that regard.
The Haunting is a faithful adaptation of the classic Shirley Jackson novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Aside from a couple of name changes, it remains true to the source in story, theme and tone.
One has to ask some very strange things in the job I have.
The Great Escape is a featherweight escapist entertainment (pardon the pun) disguised as a true story. While the basic facts of the story are faithful to real events, great liberties are also taken, mostly to make the film more appealing to American audiences. Even though the real event involved only British prisoners, the producers added James Garner and Steve McQueen to the cast. Garner plays Hendley, “The Scrounger”, an American who, based on his uniform, appears to fly for the Brits. It happened so that’s not too far fetched. McQueen is Hilts, “The Cooler King”, a character who spends most of his time locked in solitary confinement for his repeated escape attempts. His isolation from the rest of the characters, both before and after the titular escape, means that McQueen is almost in a completely different movie, all by himself.
