Dec. 14, 2002 - 5:34 pm
i don't know, i just started thinking about Ray Harryhausen's work with special effects the other day. you know, he did all these movies in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s with that dynamation stuff. i'm sure you'd know if if you saw it. a lot like claymation, but just extraordinarily well done. lots of monsters and things. probably his film i've seen the most often is Clash of the Titans (1981). really neat work though, so i decided to see this really famous film of his since it gets referenced so often in sci-fi and fantasy films like The Mummy (1999) and Star Wars: Episode II (2002).
this is about the famous adventurer Sinbad and how he goes to an island of monsters in order to save the girl he's going to marry. she's been shrunken by evil magic and Sinbad has to go to the island to get the ingredients for a potion to return her to her former state, thereby preventing a war with her father's city. and then he has to fight all sorts of monsters when they arrive at the island including a dragon, multiple cyclopses, and a huge two-headed bird.
well, i was primarily looking to watch this for the special effects. and that's really the main thing you get out of it. other than that it's just not that great. decent acting, decent fight scenes for the period. nothing totally disappointing i guess. my favorite scene not involving special effects was when the evil wizard is going on and on (very intensely) about the impending doom of Bagdad in front of the king...about how the great buildings will fall, women and children will suffer, bones will break! and then Sinbad comes running up to him, chokes him, and throws him to the ground. "Good work Sinbad!" says the king. that made me laugh a lot.
but anyway, i've made a fairly cool addition to the diary over the past day or two here. i really don't get that many movie suggestions with the link on the left that was there previously. i decided it would work out better, and be more fun for me, to create a popup window with a form in it to where if you wanted to, you can just type in the info about the movie and it'll then get emailed to me. keeps any secondary email software from coming into the submission process. if that's not clear enough, basically what you need to do if you want to suggest a movie to me for whatever reason is just click on "suggest a movie," and then a window pops up where you can suggest that movie. then you submit. and that's all there is to it. pretty cool eh? i thought so. took me a bit of work to get it functioning just the way i wanted.
i personally think everyone needs to test it out...hint hint.