A roundup of some worth while film stories you should be reading.
Take Ferris Out To The Ball Game: If you think that movie fans can be obsessive, then you probably don’t know many sports fans. And when the two intersect in one person… Well, you get someone like Larry Granillo, who looked at the meager clues available in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and managed to figure out what Chicago Cubs game Ferris, Cameron and Sloan took in during their famous day of skipping school. It was the June 5, 1985 matchup between the Cubs and the Atlanta Braves at Wrigley Field. That’s right, 30 years ago today. You can read about over at For The Win.
3Dead: Kyle Smith of the NY Post may not being bringing new to the complaints about 3D films, i.e., the terrible, murky-looking upconversions of films not shot in native 3D, the glasses, the extra expense at the box office. But he does verbalize something I’ve been hearing at screenings I’ve been to and from among the general movie-going public. The 3D process is loosing its appeal fairly rapidly. Smith almost seems to hint that there may be a corollary between the film’s quality as a film and how successful it is as a 3D movie at the box office, but doesn’t quite get there. Further exploration for another day.
Ladies, Locked And Loaded: Pound-for-pound, Grady Hendrix is probably the best writer about Asian genre cinema, and his latest piece for Film Comment is no exception. Focusing on the subgenre of “girls with guns” that flourished briefly from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s, Grady explains how these films feature ” international casts, exotic locations, lots of Uzis, a jackhammer pace, at least one fight on a construction site, some of the most synth-tastic scores of the Eighties, and many, many questionable hairstyles” and “don’t just pass the Bechdel Test, they destroyed it.” As usual with one his pieces like this, you will probably want to have your Netflix account open while you read it, adding a number of films to your queue.
A Composer In A Galaxy Far, Far Away: If you’re excited about the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens but you’re trying to remain spoiler free, this short Vanity Fair interview with composer John Williams might fit the bill for you. He talks about how he is approaching writing the music for the newest installment of the franchise his perhaps best known for without giving any actual story secrets away.
Bizarre Boy Bubby:The Australian Centre For The Moving Image asks if there is an Australian film weirder than writer/director Rolf de Heer’s 1992 feature Bad Boy Bubby? Our answer – probably not, at least until they decide to make a Danger 5 movie.
And finally: A holdover from the Memorial Day weekend, this local news story from Tamp FL, looks at the annual commemoration ceremony at the only veteran’s cemetery in the county and mentions its perhaps most famous interee, the 1930s and 40s horror movie icon Rondo Hatton. A veteran of World War One, he found fame in films after acromegaly began to distort his facial features. (Not the result of a mustard gas attack as was thought at the time.)
