The New Classics: Master and Commander

Michael Cusumano here to explore what keeps fans returning for repeat voyages on Peter Weir's 2003 nautical adventure.

Scene: Exploring the Galapagos
Right before the climactic naval battle in Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the story pauses to watch a scientist leisurely wander the Galapagos Islands, collecting lizards and measuring giant tortoises. How many modern adventure films would halt the action dead in its tracks like that? Hell, how many films from any era would resist relegating such a detour to the cutting room floor? I can imagine David Lean including the sequence, but then his version of Master and Commander would probably push the four hour mark.

This adaptation of Patrick O’Brien’s series of novels is less about narrative urgency and more about creating a world to get lost in. Sure, when the time comes to pay-off the naval duel at the center of the plot, Master and Commander delivers in spectacular fashion. But that’s not what keeps the devotees of the film returning over and over again...

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Lunchtime Poll: Which scene in a movie made you imagine a whole other movie?

by Nathaniel R

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood was difficult to write about. That's what happens with dense movies. Naturally, then, my review left out something major. It was only after publishing it that I realized I hadn't even mentioned the extended scene that is the movie's most impressive on a filmmaking level. I'm talking about the significant detour when Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) visits Spahn's Movie Ranch. He used to shoot a TV show there a decade earlier but it's now Manson Family territory, thanks to the retired and now blind George Spahn (Bruce Dern)...

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Great Moments in Horror Actressing

by Jason Adams

We had intended to use this week's edition of our new "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror with an ode to Margot Kidder's performance... but then we re-watched The Amityville Horror, and it is so very much worse than we remembered. Not scary, tedious, with cardboard performances; a mere shadow of that decade's many better horror films. I have no idea how it became a hit, and I felt actively bad for Margot while re-watching it.

So in order to make it up to the actress, let's take a look instead at the crown jewel in her horror crown (give or take a Sisters), her hilarious work five years earlier as the deliciously crusty co-ed Barb in Bob Clark's slasher Black Christmas...

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Lunchtime Poll: What would you do with a $2 Million Tip?

by Nathaniel R

On this day 25 years ago It Could Happen to You was released, a romantic comedy in which a cop (Nicolas Cage) wins the lottery and shares half his fortune with a waitress (Bridget Fonda) who he was unable to tip. The original and far superior title was Cop Gives Waitress $2 Million Tip. That year in its rejected honor, my friends and I would jokingly refer to movies by a single sentence plot rather than titles... Streep Goes White Water Rafting, Vampire Brad Feels Guilt, This Bus Is a Bomb! etc -- shut up, it was funny at the time.

In its honor today, what would you do with a $2 million dollar windfall? The catch is that you have to spend half of it on the movies. Would you invest in films, be a patron for an auteur, gift it to a struggling actor, or other? (After the jump, an Oscar-adjacent list for fun)

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White Zombie (1932)

 

Have you ever seen any of the early Bela Lugosi movies? Audiences must have been really freaked out by his eyes because the movies kept pushing that stare as the ultimate in horror (Dracula had arrived the year before). White Zombie was the first feature film about zombies, a genre now so common you forget that there had to be a first. The film, now celebrating its 87th birthday, is streaming on Amazon Prime and since it's only 66 minutes long we decided to zip right through yesterday... 

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