One of my goals this year is to simplify my life, and one way to simplify is to reduce discretionary spending. Subscribing to Netflix falls in this category. Once I discontinued my subscription, I thought I wouldn’t be able to see recently released DVDs. Thanks to MCPL, that’s not the case.
Most newly released DVDs I want to watch are in the Library system. There are some caveats: I usually have to place the item on hold and the wait time might be a little while. Also, new DVDs usually must be returned within 7 days. I can live with that.
During WWII and even the Korean War, Hollywood produced films that doubled as pure support-the-war propaganda. Not so for the Vietnam War, filmmakers took an increasingly dim and damning view of this overseas conflict that proved so fractious for so long. But even the most cynical films focused on the Vietnam War offer important stories, and even these present moments of heroism and valor.
Documentary Films and the Lives of "Interesting" People
I suppose we define eccentricity as "someone stranger than ourselves." I imagine that some people find the fact that I am willing to drive long distances just to take a picture of a rare bird to be eccentric. I am a 44-year old man who owns a Star Wars T-shirt for every day of the week, and I'm sure some people view that as eccentric. I won’t argue with them. I find eccentric people to be interesting people, which makes me glad to be one of their ranks.
Halloween is one of my favorite times of the year. A big reason for this is my unabashed love of the horror movies Universal Studios produced in the 1930s.
Can you imagine Halloween without Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, the Wolfman, or Dracula? You can't, and even more, you have a very specific image of what those characters should look like. There is a reason for that: Universal Pictures monster movies. During an incredible run from the 1920s to the 1950s, Universal Pictures laid the framework for all subsequent horror films. The secret to their success?
With Halloween fast approaching, I've been thinking a lot about scary movies. In our last post, we looked at the classic Universal Pictures monster movies. By the 1950s, however, science fiction films had overtaken monster movies at Universal Pictures. Things looked bleak for Frankenstein et al, as they’d been reduced to being co-stars in comedy films. But in far-off Britain, the folks at Hammer Films were about to give the monsters a new lease on life.
Over the last few blog posts, in the spirit of Halloween, we've been looking at classic horror movies in the form of the famous Universal and Hammer monster films. In the process, we've looked at such scary movie icons as Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Claude Rains, the Lon Chaneys Sr. and Jr., Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing. But as I've been writing these, I realized that I had neglected one of the towering figures of the genre: Vincent Price.
On Monday, October 29th at 6:00 p.m., we will be showing the 1958 version of The House on Haunted Hill starring Vincent Price.
Frederick Loren has invited five strangers to a party of a lifetime. He is offering each of them $10,000 if they can stay the night in a house. This house, however, is no ordinary house...
