Reaching for the Moon. Edmund Goulding. 1930.

Yes, I’m back to plowing through the box sets of public domain movies after a luxurious 4K break.

The version I have is 25 minutes shorter than the IMDB length, so I guess this is… the very un-restored version?

Irving Berlin… Douglas Fairbanks… Bebe Daniels? Is she famous? Oh, indeed she was: She did a buttload of stuff in the teens and the twenties, but only a dozen or so things in the 30s, and then she kinda disappeared, which probably explains who I can’t remember the name. I mean, other than my old timer’s disease.

Oh, I’ve seen her before in a horrible movie, made in the same year as this one.

This has Edward Everett Horton! My favourite!

It’s an odd movie. I was expecting some kind of cookie cutter screwball thing, but it’s not that: Instead it’s a movie in search of a plot. It’s got some great performances, but it’s just hard to not zone out. It’s just incomprehensible. Perhaps the missing 25 minutes had the plot bits?

Hm:

The film was originally intended to be a musical with songs written by Irving Berlin but problems soon developed. From the start, Berlin found Edmund Goulding, the director, difficult to work with. Also by mid-1930 the studio realized that the public’s demand for musicals had disappeared. So Goulding jettisoned many of Berlin’s songs from the score

That doesn’t explain why the plot is impossible to follow, though.

I likes all the scenes with Horton.

Target of an Assassin. Peter Collinson. 1977.

Huh. I thought this was from that box set of public domain movies… but this is from 1977? Perhaps they got a few really cheap movies in there as well? I mean, this is from:

Which doesn’t sound very high toned.

Hm… It’s shot in South Africa and so there are drums all over the soundtrack.

My god, this is dreary. I’m bailing on this. Perhaps it’s fabulous really? But I’ll never know.

Target of an Assassin. Peter Collinson. 1977. ☐

Oh the irony!

Godzilla II: The King of the Monsters. Michael Dougherty. 2019.

I have to say that there’s bits of this that doesn’t make that much sense. Those bits are: The beginning, the middle, and the end.

But it’s Godzilla, so it’s not like I was expecting anything else, really. The attraction is seeing some CGI monsters tear down some CGI cities while some Japanese guy talks about the Earth being out of balance and stuff. And it delivers on those points, although disappointingly enough, so much of the CGI takes place at night, under water, during a snow storm (i.e., the ideal environment for cheaping out on the CGI).

I mean, the budget was only $170M.

This movie hits all the notes of a Godzilla movie: Sometimes it’s so on the nose that you wonder whether they’re doing this as a parody of a Godzilla movie, but it’s not.

If you’re not into Godzilla, you’ll find it a total bore. But I give it all thumbs up.