Risselada Blog

Under discussion:

D.O.A.  (1949)

White Heat  (1949)

This blog entry is part of my “movie year countdown”.  To read more about that check out my first Spout filmblog entry.

White Heat

It's always exciting to see an older movie and hear a famous line you'd heard before but didn't know where it came from.  It's even more exciting when the movie totally rocks, as is the case for me with White Heat.

Cagney is such a watchable actor for me.  And it was interesting to see Edmond O'Brien again just after watching D.O.A.  This seems to happen to me often in watching movies from my "movie year countdown" list.  Other actors I've seen in movies very close to each other are Tony Curtis, Takashi Shimura, Claude Rains, and Olivia de Havilland, from what I remember.  It kind of reminds you that there were the same cast of stars and regular players in all eras of movie making.

 Another movie where you have the good guy and the bad guy, but you almost root for the bad guy more than the good guy even though you know there's just no way he can come out on top, no matter what his ma keeps telling him.  Oh yeah, very Freudian too.

Rating: 9/10

Under discussion:

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer  (1964)

Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer

I was in a live theatre production that performed the script for this classic television movie special verbatum.  We also tried to recreate all of the same costumes and stop-motion style movement.  They've been staging various famous Christmas specials every year like this during Christmas at The Annoyance Theater for a long time.  So I had to watch a DVD of this movie several times.  I was actually an understudy, so I had to play several parts.  So I've watched this thing concentrating on several different characters.

I know a lot of people go ga-ga for these old Rankin and Bass stop-motion animation holiday specials.  There's a certain weird flavor to them that's amusing, but I'm just not thoroughly entertained by them.  Not that I didn't have a fantastic time performing in the show, but I'm not going to go out of my way to watch any more of them unless I have to.

Rating: 5/10