Sunday, December 16, 2007

The Shadow of a Flying Carpet in Passing

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
directed by Raoul Walsh
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD with ELO

For every languid, dream-like Days of Being Wild, a thousand pretenders to the throne steal about in tricks of atmosphere and shorthands of forgotten memories. But happiness must be earned, says the man who stirs his steaming pot of food like the slow revolution of centuries, in a movie that begins somewhere between Algernon Blackwood's Sand and The Fog's "one more story before twelve" - although Thief begins fearlessly, where horror is burnished like wonder. I've never read The Arabian Nights, and to the degree that it exists in my consciousness, it is as a wholly fabricated exoticism. This is the film one makes with minarets and desert stars in mind; Fairbanks last words were reportedly, "I've never felt better!," truly a great man's epitaph.



A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
directed by Bill Melendez
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD with ELO

The sound design is something else in these Peanuts specials: the snow-shoe shuffle of Pig-Pen's gathering dust, the intake of breath before the kids start singing, how silence is used as the metronome to pace half an hour by. When people talk about translating comics to the screen, no one ever mentions that the reading experience is soundless. However you imagine a character speaking, or the ambient greetings in the neighborhood where Charlie Brown lives, you read in a space that is quiet or loud, per your usual habits. When I read, I can hear the filament in the lightbulb, the passing cars on the road outside, and the noise my dog makes when he changes positions or moves from one room to another. It's how I think of snowfall, actually - as nature staying in - and why Christmas is Schulz's and his hero's season.