***+ / *****
Fun flick - not at all the trainwreck that it was made out to be. Milly Alcock was a perfect Supergirl - though both she and the source material deserved a better film.
Just got back from seeing THE ODYSSEY in imax and it made me remember the power of the theatrical experience for the first time in years. Spectacular.
Godzilla balloon used to promote the original film in Tokyo, 1954
Here’s a kidney, Criterion: The Complete Kubrick
“Collected here for the first time are Kubrick’s thirteen features and three shorts, all restored in 4K, with their original soundtracks alongside the 5.1 mixes, restored and remastered; over twenty-five hours of interviews, documentaries, and behind-the-scenes materials; and deluxe packaging illustrated with rare photographs, artwork, and documents annotated by Kubrick himself, all housed in a singular box inspired by the director’s legendary archive.”
recent blu/4k acquisitions; physical media FTW
in.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (Webber & Watson, 1928)
It was the midwinter of 1926, in Rochester, New York, when James Sibley Watson, Jr. and his friend Melville Webber first started filming their adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”. They had set up in an old stable; the cast was made up of Herbert Stern (a local architect), Sibley Watson’s wife Hildegard, and Webber himself. They only had twelve kilowatts of direct current for lighting, and very little heat, let alone room for sets...... it was clear they could not make anything like The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the Gaston Leroux adaptation that had reconstructed the Grand Opera in Paris for its shocked audience the previous year. So instead, over the next two years, they created a thirteen-minute feature that has been called one of the first avant-garde films produced in the United States: a work that seeks to evoke not the plot or even characters of its source material but Poe’s claustrophobic, itchy energy
