Ryan Watches 50 Movies

First of all, I want to mention that I just spent 20 minutes wandering around my apartment looking under things because I could not find my notes on this movie, before finally finding them in an unlikely place. Now, it may just be that I misplaced them, but I don't think that's the true explanation. I'm almost certain that my notes were, in fact, stolen and hidden from me by... THE PHANTOM ! The Phantom of the Opera is a 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney (Senior), based on the 1909 novel by Gaston Leroux, which was of course based on the Twiggy episode of The Muppet Show , in which the theater is haunted by the Phantom of the Muppet Show. These days, of course, when most people think of the Phantom story, they think of the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. I've seen the musical, but fortunately I had forgotten enough of it that I didn't know everything that was going to happen in the movie. Synopsis The Paris Opera House is enormous, and grand, and palatial... and...

Hi there. I ran out of time to watch The Phantom of the Opera this week. But I had a pretty good reason... or rather, reasons. Let me tell you about it (them). On Thursday, I attempted to go to a free outdoor screening of Cabaret , but it was rained out, so I watched it at a friend's apartment instead. It was not quite what I expected. I was surprised to see that all of the musical numbers in the film were presented as performances at the titular nightclub, and the characters never spontaneously burst into song, as is traditional in musicals. Is there a term for this subset of musicals? But it was still a pretty good movie. On Monday, I went to a free outdoor screening of Superman , which was the most crowded and high-energy movie screening I've ever been to. People were cheering and whooping and applauding for pretty much everything Superman ever did, and for the duration of the film, for all of the New Yorkers squeezed together on the lawn at Bryant Park, Superma...

Several movies ago, I watched The Fatal Hour , a detective movie starring Boris Karloff as the Chinese detective Mr. Wong. Doomed to Die is the second Wong movie in this DVD set, which doesn't mean much because as you know, two Wongs don't make a right. According to IMDb, Doomed was made just after Fatal Hour , in the same year (1940). It also features the return of spunky girl detective Bobbi Logan and cranky cop Captain Street, and like its predecessor, it's not a horror film at all, but rather a murder mystery. Yep, it sure has a lot in common with The Fatal Hour , which is a movie I have seen. So it was interesting to me that when I went back and read my entry on Fatal Hour just now, I remembered almost nothing from it. When I saw Bobbi Logan and Captain Street in this week's movie, I had no idea I had seen them before. As I've gone through these "horror classic" movies, I've often wondered how much will stick with me... and now I have my answer....

I've watched a number of zombie movies in this Horror Classics DVD set, all made in the 1930s and '40s, and thus far they've all left a lot to be desired. White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, King of the Zombies, Ma and Pa Zombie Back on the Farm -- these were all movies I endured rather than enjoyed. But to my surprise, this week's horror classic was 1968's Night of the Living Dead , a zombie movie directed by George A. Romero which is so influential they're still making sequels to and knockoffs of it. In fact, this may be the first movie in this box set that can accurately and without question be referred to as both a horror film and a classic. I've never gone out of my way to see zombie movies (I enjoyed 28 Days Later well enough but skipped 28 Weeks Later and had no interest in I Am Legend ), but they can be pretty darn effective when done well. So I was curious to see this movie, and especially to see if it still seemed scary. Synopsis After some eeri...