![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Friday Update
Apr. 7th, 2017 09:00 pm 1. Almost done the baby sweater I have to knit to prove I can knit so I can potentially get some piecework as a test knitter. I'll have it done well before the ten-day turnaround time they need, though I've come to the conclusion that the hood is the most voluminous part of the hoodie.
2. Watched the 1931 Maltese Falcon a couple of days ago. I prefer Bebe Daniels' Miss Wonderly (they never drop the alias in this version) to Mary Astor's. Dwight Frye as Wilmer gets less screen time than Elijah Cook, Jr., but is equally nervy; he apparently kills Gutman (Dudley Digges) and Dr. Cairo (Otto Matieson) offscreen as they head back to "Constantinople." Digges isn't bad; his Kaspar Gutman makes me think he would have played an excellent Mr. Pickwick or, in the villain line, Charles Augustus Milverton. Matieson's Cairo is basically the same as Lorre's, but he misses putting it over the top like Lorre.
As Spade, Ricardo Cortez (born Jacob Krantz) is a completely different character from Bogart's detective. I feel like Bogart is a 1940s character and Cortez is a 1930s one, if that makes sense. He swings wildly between suave and goofily, snappishly sarcastic. He might even have the tiniest touch of sentiment, but only the tiniest. He was definitely sleeping with his partners wife -- for one thing she's Thelma Todd as opposed to Gladys George, who seemed flaky enough to have just imagined his interest, and who did not, in 1941, leave a kimono at Spade's place. There is a neat twist at the end, as long as you don't understand enough Cantonese to have been spoilered back in the first few scenes.
3. I have deleted my LJ, though I think it takes sixty days to believe me. I've located most of my LJ flist on DW, and feel rather as though we ought to have some kind of site-warming party, though it's not easy across time zones. Feel free to post hellos in the comments, however.
ETA 4. Also rewatched Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle which, if you've never seen it, is a movie that has absolutely zero interest in subtlety or psychological realism. Its cartoonish grotesquerie is more touching than a lot of Oscar-nominated films, probably because of the sincerity of Chow's love for the Shaw Brothers, the Warner Brothers, the Peking Opera (I'm guessing from the soundtrack), unexplained heel-face turns and fairytale logic. I'd like to see it in a double bill with Galaxy Quest, because the former is about storytelling as the greatest human invention and Kung Fu Hustle is the kind of ridiculous cheese that could inspire naive extraterrestrials to acts of nobility and heroism.
2. Watched the 1931 Maltese Falcon a couple of days ago. I prefer Bebe Daniels' Miss Wonderly (they never drop the alias in this version) to Mary Astor's. Dwight Frye as Wilmer gets less screen time than Elijah Cook, Jr., but is equally nervy; he apparently kills Gutman (Dudley Digges) and Dr. Cairo (Otto Matieson) offscreen as they head back to "Constantinople." Digges isn't bad; his Kaspar Gutman makes me think he would have played an excellent Mr. Pickwick or, in the villain line, Charles Augustus Milverton. Matieson's Cairo is basically the same as Lorre's, but he misses putting it over the top like Lorre.
As Spade, Ricardo Cortez (born Jacob Krantz) is a completely different character from Bogart's detective. I feel like Bogart is a 1940s character and Cortez is a 1930s one, if that makes sense. He swings wildly between suave and goofily, snappishly sarcastic. He might even have the tiniest touch of sentiment, but only the tiniest. He was definitely sleeping with his partners wife -- for one thing she's Thelma Todd as opposed to Gladys George, who seemed flaky enough to have just imagined his interest, and who did not, in 1941, leave a kimono at Spade's place. There is a neat twist at the end, as long as you don't understand enough Cantonese to have been spoilered back in the first few scenes.
3. I have deleted my LJ, though I think it takes sixty days to believe me. I've located most of my LJ flist on DW, and feel rather as though we ought to have some kind of site-warming party, though it's not easy across time zones. Feel free to post hellos in the comments, however.
ETA 4. Also rewatched Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle which, if you've never seen it, is a movie that has absolutely zero interest in subtlety or psychological realism. Its cartoonish grotesquerie is more touching than a lot of Oscar-nominated films, probably because of the sincerity of Chow's love for the Shaw Brothers, the Warner Brothers, the Peking Opera (I'm guessing from the soundtrack), unexplained heel-face turns and fairytale logic. I'd like to see it in a double bill with Galaxy Quest, because the former is about storytelling as the greatest human invention and Kung Fu Hustle is the kind of ridiculous cheese that could inspire naive extraterrestrials to acts of nobility and heroism.
