I’m not quite sure I did the great Boris Karloff justice with the clip I selected earlier this evening. Below, therefore, I’m putting some later career highlights of the great character actor who managed to play some of the nastiest monsters and villains of his era in innumerable films while also being considered one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. (Apparently that little girl he threw in the lake in “Bride of Frankenstein” couldn’t get enough of him, even in full monster make-up.)
First, some of Karloff’s very cool introductory remarks from Mario Bava’s multistory horror flick, “Black Sabbath” — which not only gave Ozzy Osbourne’s seminal heavy metal its name but also was reportedly part of the inspiration, structurally at least, for “Pulp Fiction.”
A few items as Hollywood finishes digesting its turkey and stuffing.
* Paramount has picked up “Area 51,” the science fiction follow-up to the ridiculously profitable “Paranormal Activity” from writer-director Oren Peli. Somewhat to my disappointment, this one will also use the “found footage” gimmick, though I guess we can assume that with an exponentially larger budget — $5 million (about enough to pay for craft services on some films) as opposed to $15,000 — Peli will at least attempt to spread his wings creatively. One reason to give him props, however, is that the film has already wrapped principal photography. We can’t accuse the Israel-born former video game designer of failing to strike while the iron’s hot!
* It appears that The Playlist broke the story that it appears that the very talented Paul Greengrass has left the helm of “Bourne 4” and if he goes, Matt Damon may not be far behind. Still, at this point it’s a tale without an ending in more ways than one
* Kim Masters considers “Avatar” and Robert Zemeckis’s motion capture and 3-D work as featured currently in “A Christmas Carol.” To me, they’re creatively too different beasts in that James Cameron‘s creations aren’t trying so hard to be realistic, which I think is the real reason for the “ugly” problem with the creator of Roger Rabbit’s more recent work. As for the “Avatar” characters, I’m not sure I’m going to love them yet, either, but we’ll see when the movie’s out. I’m also not at all sure that movies need to be revolutionized in quite this way.
* It technically ended yesterday, but the Boris Karloff Blogathon, hosted where else but at Frankensteinia, lives on with tons of material still coming in submitted by innumerable bloggers about the late, great character actor who originated the role of Frankenstein’s monster in 1931. Definitely worth many looks.
The vocal there is quite obviously reconstructed using the original recording by Bobby “Boris” Pickett. If you want to hear the actual vocal from the 1965 episode of “Shindig” featuring the real Boris Karloff, you may hear it here.
My Wednesday prediction that this would be a healthy Thanksgiving weekend at the box office certainly proved true — and it was nice to see it wasn’t at the rest of the economy’s expense: holiday shopping actually went up slightly this year and went up a lot more virtually. Also, the movie everyone expected to hit number actually did one hit number one. However, looking beneath the surface just slightly, movie consumers were making some interesting choices.
The argument prognosticators were making last week was that Summit’s “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” pretty much had to come out on top because, considering its $142 million+ opening weekend, even if it suffered a catastrophic drop in its second weekend, it still would be ahead of everything else, and that’s pretty much what happened. The vampire-werewolf-human love triangle dropped a massive 70% but, as reported by Box Office Mojo‘s weekend chart and trade mag writers jolly Carl DiOrio and Pamela McClintock, it still earned an estimated $42.5. That was a mere $2.375 million ahead of this week’s surprise #2 film, “The Blind Side,” which not only actually won the box office race on Thanksgiving day (which is not included in the weekend tallies) but came refreshingly close to winning the weekend with $40.125 million. The five day total for the films offer a bit more air between the #1 and #2 spots, with an estimated $66 million for “New Moon” and just over $57.5 for “The Blind Side.”
The impressive aspect of the Sandra Bullock-led sports film/cross-cultural family drama combo is that it did something I don’t remember seeing whenever I’ve been paying close attention to grosses. In a world where we think it’s good if a film drops less than 45-50% on its second weekend, “The Blind Side” actually climbed 17.6% on its second go-round without a significant expansion (it went from being in 3,310 theaters to 3,340). I haven’t seen the film but I will say that this seems to be a sign that it’s possible what attracts most audiences today isn’t so different from what attracted them 50 or 75 years ago.
The San Francisco-born, Hong Kong-raised master of martial arts would have been sixty-nine years old today. Here’s a brutally effective scene from “Fist of Fury” a.k.a. “The Big Boss” — sorry about not very good dubbing in the set-up, but this is how almost every one of my generation in the States first saw these films.
And’s here’s a brief clip from of one of Lee’s small roles in mainstream American films. Watch as the young actor does a number on the office belonging to James Garner as Raymond Chandler’s legendary P.I. in 1969’s “Marlowe.”
Looking at these scenes, it’s clear that Lee had several times the presence of many superstars. It would have been interesting to see how far he would have been allowed to go as an Asian-American if he’d survived the see the release of “Enter the Dragon.” Even today, it seems like the glass ceiling for Asian-American actors is borderline impenetrable and doubly so, for whatever reason, if they’re male and not already superstars in Asia, but that’s another blog post.
By the way, that’s a very young Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams, of course, and David Krumholtz (“Numbers”) as the shy fake Native-American. And the song, not too surprisingly, is by Marc Shaiman, who’s wittily combined Broadway-style music with varying degrees of irreverent comedy in everything from the instant classic “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut” to “Hairspray” and, let’s hope, this year’s Oscar telecast.
Anyhow, enjoy your Thanksgiving. Cardigans and highballs, optional.
