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| Movie night: Heli drones, Milky Way, Phantom | Aug 27, 2011 2:33 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Movie night!
This shows a pretty neat quadruple helicopter remote spy drone thingy used by the Libyan rebels; they're manufactured by a Canadian company, and go for a mere $100-200,000 a pop, according to this article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ3hEt0EOkc
Here's a really pretty time-lapse video of the Milky Way spinning over the night skies of South Dakota—A*'s right in the middle there, you know!—this summer:
http://vimeo.com/28040685
If you like that one, you'll probably also like the one I embedded in April.
And to complete our triple feature, we have the 1929 silent film version of "The Phantom of the Opera," starring Lon Chaney in the title role:
[Edit 5/26/18: video no longer on YouTube]
I've never seen any of Chaney's other movies, and I'm hoping it's just a really good make-up job in this, because otherwise...he's a *really* creepy looking dude. The exaggerated expressions and variable film speed of silent movies seem a bit corny these days, but when well done—as I think they are here—they're also...kinda mesmerizing. I also find this particular film interesting because of the use of different color tints over the film, to give different effects to different scenes (something I've done once in A*! maybe I'll have to do that some more).
Hm, the Wikipedia page on the movie is an interesting read! Says Chaney was given the freedom to do his own makeup; and there's the story that some members of initial audiences fainted when his visage was first unveiled.
And there were many versions of the movie! Universal actually put out not one but three versions in 1925: audiences didn't like the first, so the director was fired, and the thing was re-shot; they didn't like the second, either, finding it too long, so that was pulled and a tightened up version was released, and third time was the charm.
But that wasn't the end of it! Sound movies were just coming along, and so about half the movie was re-shot to add spoken dialogue for a sound version released in 1930—that version, however, has not survived. Chaney's voice was not included in it, as he was with MGM by that time; posters for the film version had to emphasize "Lon Chaney's portrayal is a silent one!" The best surviving print is supposed to be one "struck from an original camera negative for George Eastman House in the early 1950s by Universal Pictures," but it seems to be a combination of the 1925 version, and some of the silent parts from the 1930 version, which mostly used footage taken by a second camera, so the action is seen from slightly different angles.
Oh yeah! I also like the extensive use of creepy shadows—some of which are clearly painted on, but hey! It's also interesting to note that some scenes of the 1925 version were filmed in the fancy new Technicolor process; only one has survived: the riotous "Bal Masqué" party scene.
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