Dailies: Have You Met Abbie Normal?

Feeling more low-key today, so this will be a short one. The image above is from one of the great parody horror films: Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974). Lots of fun with names and mispronunciation of names (“Frankensteen!”), including the supposed owner of the brain that Igor steals for his master: “Abbie Normal.” Hey: no one’s perfect.

Every now and then, when something seems amiss (why are there golfball-sized hailstones coming down out there? why does my foot feel so weird? why do I keep getting invitations to someone else’s 25th anniversary party?), I find myself saying: “Now that’s Abbie Normal.” Pin all the unexplained phenomenon on her; you’ll feel better about it.

Films about Filmmaking, Part I: Hugo (2011)

Over the next week (or so), I’ll look at three films that explore the magic of filmmaking, with old-looking cameras and projectors in the spotlight, so to speak: 8½ (1963), Cinema Paradiso (1988), and Hugo (2011). Unlike previous features, I’ll break this one up into three parts, starting in reverse order.

Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is set in 1930s Paris and explores the later years of film artist and technical innovator Georges Méliès. Based on Brian Selznick’s novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), Scorsese’s adaptation focuses on the relationship between an orphaned boy, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), who winds all the clocks in Montparnasse train station, and Méliès himself (Ben Kingsley), who runs a toyshop in the same station and has become embittered by the modern world’s neglect of his artistry.

Dailies: Talk Back Tuesday, Or Why We Love…

I celebrate Halloween for the entire month of October, though my celebrations take a different form each year. For example, I used to “go out” for Halloween and dress up; I don’t anymore, but I see nothing wrong with it: there’s the pageantry, and the general appreciation of things dark and subterranean and slightly anarchical. And isn’t that the essence of Halloween and its associated film genre, hahrah, an examination (sometimes intelligent, sometimes not so much) of the disorderly aspects of life, sometimes operating underneath the surface? This is partly the concern of the Gothic, the literary genre most responsible for influencing cinematic horror: there’s a beautiful ancestral home (say, in an exotic locale of Italy or France) in which reside beautiful residents; but these pleasing exteriors disguise something foul, something rotting underneath.

Dailies: Marilyn Monroe and Skyler White (More Back Talk)

Here’s another sort of “Back Talk” post, which responds to SteveB, who mentioned Marilyn’s white dress in Seven Year Itch (1954) as an iconic cinematic moment. Though I’m diverging a bit (as usual), I’ll say a little about that dress.

Dailies: Back Talk, Donnie Darko Style

So here’s another post inspired by one of my readers out there: Liza Fernandez. She mentioned a favourite quote from the Richard Kelly film Donnie Darko (2001). But again, because I’m stubborn, I’ve diverged from this focus a little. (Though the film is, indeed, full of good dialogue.)

I like the Gyllenhaal siblings a lot.