More Beautiful than Pocahontas and Helen of Troy
Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)
directed by Jack Clayton
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
The names alone are worth a good review: Tom Fury, seller of lightning rods; Jim Nightshade; the Dust Witch. That opening monologue is a masterpiece in miniature, abetted by a small town in the hand of a hill. After so many movies, that eerie October of Meet Me in St. Louis finds its way in. This is a fairy tale as they rarely exist in the modern world, familiar and unsettling and strange.
In fiction, mothers often hate daughters for their youth, and fathers reclaim their lost teenage years through affairs with teenage girls. Here, Jason Robards' Halloway is jealous of his son's age, but does not so much use it against the child as carry his envy as a temperamental melancholy. Will, the boy, feels isolated from his dad, and the two are uneasy with one another, if not exactly at loggerheads. It also explains why Will is such good friends with fatherless Jim.
The tone reminded me of A Child's Christmas in Wales, gentle but sad. With death at one's heels at the end of a life, there is more to remember in dreams, but the same old regrets run like deep currents. Mr. Dark, as he tears away the pages, cuts at Halloway's long-festering wound. It is a remarkable scene of pain, and when the Dust Witch floats towards the camera in her lacy, tattered black dress, I shuddered in the dark.
Jack Clayton directed The Innocents, a movie I watched on a wet afternoon in Mississippi and still remember oh so clearly. He is Jack of Ghosts, a mystic of soundstage forests and real Vermont pumpkin fields. As autumn evenings whisper more persistently, the disagreements between Clayton and Bradbury (or Disney's disappointment with the final cut) seem irrelevant. If the movie had done well, the stories would likely not exist at all. This is a fine carnival film, a great movie about childhood, and a marvel of subconscious imagination and fears.
directed by Jack Clayton
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
The names alone are worth a good review: Tom Fury, seller of lightning rods; Jim Nightshade; the Dust Witch. That opening monologue is a masterpiece in miniature, abetted by a small town in the hand of a hill. After so many movies, that eerie October of Meet Me in St. Louis finds its way in. This is a fairy tale as they rarely exist in the modern world, familiar and unsettling and strange.
In fiction, mothers often hate daughters for their youth, and fathers reclaim their lost teenage years through affairs with teenage girls. Here, Jason Robards' Halloway is jealous of his son's age, but does not so much use it against the child as carry his envy as a temperamental melancholy. Will, the boy, feels isolated from his dad, and the two are uneasy with one another, if not exactly at loggerheads. It also explains why Will is such good friends with fatherless Jim.
The tone reminded me of A Child's Christmas in Wales, gentle but sad. With death at one's heels at the end of a life, there is more to remember in dreams, but the same old regrets run like deep currents. Mr. Dark, as he tears away the pages, cuts at Halloway's long-festering wound. It is a remarkable scene of pain, and when the Dust Witch floats towards the camera in her lacy, tattered black dress, I shuddered in the dark.
Jack Clayton directed The Innocents, a movie I watched on a wet afternoon in Mississippi and still remember oh so clearly. He is Jack of Ghosts, a mystic of soundstage forests and real Vermont pumpkin fields. As autumn evenings whisper more persistently, the disagreements between Clayton and Bradbury (or Disney's disappointment with the final cut) seem irrelevant. If the movie had done well, the stories would likely not exist at all. This is a fine carnival film, a great movie about childhood, and a marvel of subconscious imagination and fears.
posted by NPK at 12:01 AM
<< Home