Talking And Ticking

This weekend in addition to Paddington (see yesterday's entry) we also caught two other movies off Hulu because the girls had taken a break from cleaning -- and cleaning out -- Sarah's room. I dropped off the third and fourth bags of STUFF at ReStore this morning before work! But that's ok too. After getting home from Marketplace for the day, I got my nap in and I could take on the world after that. But thank God I wasn't sent out to ...

One of those two movies was Vampire Dog, a low-budget "family friendly" 2012 film where a 600-year-old talking (!) dog with a craving for cherry gelatin (not blood, why is explained in the film) is sent to a suburban family and while Fang (the dog) is on the run from a bungling scientist, his owner's facing troubles adapting to a new school, overcoming shyness, and helping Lugosi Middle School keep from closing "by becoming a charter school". Seems silly enough, but it's fun!

Then we happened to be searching for a Charlie Chaplin movie; I believed I mentioned Modern Times when I saw a scene of a man crawling around inside a clock (which Chaplin does in the film) but we could only find clips of that. But then our attention got directed to Harold Lloyd's 1923 silent film Safety Last! which is mostly set in a department store. I looked up some information about it while we were watching and Martha wondered aloud why I couldn't just watch the movie!

Again, was doing some research and one scene, where Lloyd's character is climbing the side of a building and ends up hanging off the minute hand of a giant clock, has been done homage quite a few times. Think Doc Brown in the first Back to the Future film and Molly in her dream sequence in the first Look Who's Talking, among other things. And if you known British comedy, think of Are You Being Served? on steroids -- at least I did!

Turns out that Lloyd was a more popular and prolific actor in his day than Chaplin was ... the reason he's not as well known is because decades later HE and not the studio owned his films, so he could command exorbitant prices for the rights to show them. Not a lot of theaters wanted to pay up, and he was also insistent on organ, not piano, accompaniment which would be hard for most theaters today to accommodate.

Martha and I also turned on Safety Last! because we considered exposing the kids who've never know a world without synchronized sound (where the sound matches what you see on-screen which we take for granted today) to it. Sarah was seated on the floor and Jeffrey was seated with ear buds plugged into his tablet on the other couch. We saw him looking up sometimes though.

I asked him about two-thirds of the way through how he liked the film, after Martha and I explained what silent film was (and why he didn't hear the people in it say anything), and Jeffrey responded after shrugging his shoulders, "Ok, I'm putting these [the ear buds] back in -- I want to hear talking!"). I was smart enough to type this into my phone at 10:12 pm Saturday night since I couldn't write it down just then!

Really, I'm smarter than I look.

David