I haven't been bloggin' much the last couple of weeks. I had that garage sale and sure worked a lot getting ready. Didn't get rid of enough stuff to make it worth while but I did get a lot of stuff sorted out. Much of it went out into the garage and the house looks more spacious for some reason.
I decided to take a saturday off and watch some of the movies that had been piling up. While I was having breakfast and starting the FNM entry I watched Across the Pacific with Humphrey Bogart. It's a 1942 movie directed by John Huston. Bogart is reunited with Sydney Greenstreet and Mary Astor. They were all together in The Maltese Falcon the year before and Warner Brothers wanted to see if they can capture that magic again. Bogart is a soldier drummed out of the service for stealing some money. He can't enlist with the Canadian Army, they think he stinks, so he heads for Asia radiating displeasure with US America. He meets Greenstreet and Astor aboard the Japanese ship he buys passage on. It stops at the Panama Canal, where everyone gets off. Turns out Humphrey is secretly working for the government and Greenstreet is a traitor. Mary Astor is a good kid in this one. I never cared for her much. I don't know why. Sydney is after the flight plans of the airforce guarding the Canal. The movie was originally written with a plot to attack Pearl Harbor but that happened before the movie got made and the story was changed. It's an ok story, nothing magical like TMF, but a good solid piece of entertainment. Glad I recorded it off of TCM the other day. Most of the stuff I have piled up is from that great channel.
I looked at a new LEGO site last night. It's called LEGOfan and I was reading their Hot Topics section. There was a long string of comments about the current quality problem at LEGO. Some of the sets this year have been coming with defective parts, missing parts and colors with different shades. There are problems with weak clutch power and parts not fitting together as well as a builder has come to expect. I had gotten a couple of new Castle sets and found a couple of parts were not quite as easy a fit as I would normally expect. I didn't think anything of it until I read this. I wasn't missing any bricks, nor did I have any obviously defective parts. LEGO, in order to save money, has been outsourcing manufacturing to China, Hungary and the Czech Republic. LEGO closed the US plant and is planning to close the Denmark plant. They also changed some of their manufacturing processes. That often comes with a price. I hope they fix the problem. They get mixed reviews on their customer service. I haven't had any issues with them, but I haven't had that many new sets in the last couple of years. I did have another 2007 set that I hadn't built yet. The new Harry Potter Hogwarts Castle set. I thought I'd build it while I was watching all these movies.
Here's a picture of the last two sets that I built. They are part of the current Castle series.
The carriage is being driven by a black skeleton. I don't know what it means but he looks like a mean fuck. The skeleton horse also comes in black for the Harry Potter set. They add wings and it's Thestral.
I banged off several Buster Keaton films that TCM ran in a marathon some days ago. The Navigator is mostly Buster and Kathryn McGuire on a ship. Through a series of events Buster and the woman who turned down his offer of marriage wind up on the same ship which has been set a drift. Unable to operate the ship the unhappy couple are carried off by the tides. They have some wacky slapstick experiences and a visit from kidnapping natives. Buster recues the girl and she finally falls for him. It's fun and there's some good physical humor.
Stuck between the mini Busterfest were two episodes of Goofy Movies. Number four and number two, both from 1934. It's a movie parody with a newsreel, a short and a feature. All in 10 minutes. There is a running commentary by the narrator. It funny and stupid at the same time. I had never seen these before. The IMDb lists 10 episodes.
Sherlock Jr is a 1924 Buster film. Here's the story: A projectionist is studying to be a detective and is in love with a young lady. When he proposes her, his rival steals the chain watch of her father and incriminates him. The disappointed young projectionist returns to his job and while projecting the film, he dreams on being the detective of the story. Meanwhile, the girl finds the truth and acquits the guilty of the projectionist to her father. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Thanks Claudio, mostly your English is pretty good, and there are some pretty good gags and stunts in the movie. It made me laugh, as did Our Hospitality. Buster is traveling, partly on a wonderful train replica and specially made track, back to his ancestral home. There are some fun sight gags. On that train he meets a young woman and they fall in love. It turns out that the two are members of a pair of families with a long history of fueding. Each other. Oh oh. The woman's menfolk try to kill our guy but he manages to keep safe with comedy. It all has a happy ending.
Samourais is pretty bad. It was on Spike. I forget what that cable channel used to be called but their new name is stupid. Spike is to action movies what SciFi is to science fiction movies. That's right. A place to showcase the worst of each genre. This is a French Spanish German production that mostly stars Japanese guys and gals. Who knows why. There is a very annoying French guy in this and seeing him or hearing his voice had me hitting the fast forward button. That and scanning through the conmmercials made this 120 minute recording whip by in under an hour. It still seemed wasted. And I'm out half of 30 cents for a dvdr. On the other half of the disc is a movie I caught on Turner Classic Movies. The Brigand was fun enough. It's a 1952 movie based on a Alexander Dumas novel. A criminal looks like the king. The king is hurt and hidden away while the criminal takes his place. Anthony Quinn plays the bad relative who's grabbing for the throne. I didn't feel I'd wasted the 15 cents but I doubt I need to watch it again.
I put together the #1 bags of the Harry Potter Hogwarts Castle set and did notice a few bricks that were a bit hard to fit together. The small panels used to make up the walls were of a softer material than the old ones. I have been putting old sets together for the last month and I do notice a difference in the feel of the bricks and the gloss level. The new plastic is softer and feels more greasy than the old parts. Big LEGO sets come broken down into numbered bags and the first bag of the set winds up with the people and the Hogwarts greenhouse, with mandrakes. There is no Professor Sprout. It's a nice little greenhouse but I don't remember any greenhouse in HP and the Order of the Phoenix which this is supposed to represent. LEGO tries to tie their sets to the movies. I never have been totally impressed with the Harry Potter sets. I like the colors of the bricks and the various pieces. I don't even mind the shift in shades over the last few years. Mixed shades can make a building look more interesting. Often real building materials, like bricks or cut stones, have different shades and that looks good in real life. In fake plastic life the Lego sets are often missing a solidness that I prefer. The greenhouse and the Room of Requirement both close up and make nice little buildings. The other rooms on the right below have less solid walls.
The second sets of bags builds the Room of Requirement. It has three floors and a spinning wand rack. That's it above the greenhouse on the left. Bag's 3 & 4 make the rooms on the right. I found these pictures somewhere but mine looks nearly the same.
The Chance of a Lifetime is a Boston Blackie movie. I have been catching them on TCM every week. This week there were two and the first was directed by William Castle. It was his second picture and 1943 was well before he started using the gimmicks that he would become famous and remembered for. In The Chance of a Lifetime Boston Blackie has a convict rehabilitation program going. It's to help the war effort. One guy screws up and pays the price, but not before Blackie tries to help by taking the blame and going on the lam. It's all sorted out in the end. These films are mostly pretty good. They have some action, some humor, some pretty girls and some murder. In One Mysterious Night Boston Blackie is blamed for a robbery. He shows up at the police station to question this and it turns out the police were just saying that to get him to surface and help them clear his name. Cops, huh. They were more fun in the past. He goes off as a deputy and the trouble starts. Dorothy Malone has a nice part. She was the cute girl, with glasses, behind the counter in the bookstore in The Big Sleep. Bogart goes in there to keep an eye on Geiger's store which is across the street. They flirt, have a drink, her glasses come off, she closes the store and then who know's what happens next, the scene ends. I always liked her in that short scene and this is the only other thing I have seen her in other than The Falcon and the Co-eds. The Falcon series is ok too. Very much like The Saint series, and Boston Blackie is made in the same mold.
Next comes a pair of Buster Keaton films. The Cameraman has Buster trying to break into the newsreel camera business. He has some trouble and we get a laugh or to. There is a great fight in Chinatown. There is a great set that Buster uses for gags. It's the whole 6 floors of the apartment building piled one a top the other. Buster runs from the roof to the basement while the camera pans down in one take. Buster used to produce and direct his own films. He bought or built sets that he could use to his advantage. His films grew less popular and after the next film he went to work for a studio. He was never so popular again. Steamboat Bill Jr. is more of the same gags and physical stunts. Some of which are pretty big. There are buildings falling down. Some actually fall into the river and float down stream. There's a cyclone too. In between the two Buster films was a fun gag short about candid photography.
Alias Jessie James is a Bob Hope picture that I don't ever remember seeing. It's not great but it made me laugh once in a while. Bob is an insurance salesman who sells Jessie James a $100,000 policy. His boss sends him after James to keep him from getting shot. Jessie plans to have Bob killed. He'll bury Bob and pretend it was Jessie James that died. Once his girlfriend collects the insurance money, Jessie and his gal will get married and they will be set for life. Bob falls for Jessie's gal and she does the same. Eventually Bob comes out on top with a couple of kids. They didn't sell a policy against that. The Arizona Kid is a Roy Rogers film set during the Civil War. Roy and Gabby are scouts for the Confederacy. Roy is shot by some Rebel rebels and left for dead. He captures the gang, who are doing really bad things in the name of the Confederacy, and has them all executed. Harsh times, pardner. It's followed by a short about Arizona that was fun to watch. I like those old travelogues. This was a Travel Talk short. It was in color.
I recorded two Jane Fonda pictures off of Turner. Period Of Adjustment is a 1962 adaptation of a Tennesse Williams play. George Haverstick, a Korean war veteran, hastily marries Isabel, whom he met in hospital while he was recovering from a nervous condition. To Isabel's horror, they drive to Florida on their honeymoon in an old hearse. They spend much of the time quarreling, and then, on Christmas eve, they visit George's war buddy, Ralph Baltz. However Ralph's wife Dorothea has just walked out on him, taking their child. Each couple then observes the marital difficulties of the other couple. Written by Will Gilbert {[email protected]} That's the plot summary from the IMDb. It starts off fun and loud and turns sad and loud. Things work out pretty much ok, with a big sappy and wet ending with lots of hugs. It's Lois Nettleton's first big roll. She's Ralph's wife and Jane is George's wife. George is Tim Hutton and Ralph is Tony Franciosa. All are ok. The other movie is more of a drama, not a favorite genre, recorded becasue it was right after the first movie. I like making double feature dvd's off of TMC. In The Cool Of The Day has Jane and Peter Finch having an affair in Greece. Then she dies. There's no reason to see it again. Another 30 cent dvd used up.
I finished the Hogwarts Castle about 8:30. I didn't notice any more poor fitting parts and everything was there. I'll leave it up for a while and pack it away when I need the space. I am keeping a complete set of all the Harry Potter sets. I bought many extras when they were on clearence for stock to build my own sets.
I watched parts of Cat Ballou. I had seen most of it recently and thought I would snag a copy next time I saw it was on. It's pretty fun. I remember going to the theater to see it when it came out in 1965. I might have mentioned before that my brother and I, often accompanied by a local urchin or two of our acquaintance, would journey to downtown Winnipeg to see movies. I was 12 when Cat Ballou came out but I can't be sure that we weren't taken by mom, or that I saw it when it was back the next year. She used to like going to the movies. Now she doesn't watch movies anymore. I guess I have to make up for it. After CB I also watched parts of One, Two, Three the 1961 Billy Wilder movie. I had a poor copy and wanted a better one. Now I have one.
