Author: Seth Harris

An immigrant from the U.S. trying to make sense of an increasingly saddening world.

Movie Review – Angel

Angel (1937)
Written by Samson Raphaelson and Frederick Lonsdale
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Alfred Hitchcock was one of the directors who acknowledged Ernst Lubitsch’s influence on them. These filmmakers made very different types of movies, but sophistication was a common thread. They shied away from exploitation and tried to make pictures that challenged the audience’s intellect – one doing it comedically and the other through suspense. I think Angel is the most Hitchcockian Lubitsch film I’ve seen. While watching it, I was reminded of Vertigo. At the heart of this movie is a woman pretending to be someone else while keeping her private life hidden away. There is a man who pursues her out of curiosity. It’s not exactly like that classic Hitchcock film, but shares some structural threads.

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Movie Review – The Merry Widow

The Merry Widow (1934)
Written by Victor Léon, Leo Stein, Ernest Vajda, and Samson Raphaelson
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

By the mid-1930s, Hollywood was worried by the talk from Washington, D.C., about the content of their films. The puritanical didn’t like what they saw coming from the West Coast, and discussions surrounding potential censoring had started. To head that off, the film industry chose to self-regulate and had then-Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) president Will H. Hays lead the development of a list of restrictions the studios would agree to. Key among these was the removal of nudity (explicit or suggested) or “any inference of sex perversion.” These were among the Don’ts, but there was also a list of twenty-six “Be Carefuls” which included anything related to sex. Thus began an era where American cinema failed to acknowledge a primary tenant of the human experience. But before that was rolled out, we got one of the most expensive & impressive pre-code movies.

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Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – CY_Borg Part One

CY_Borg (Free League Publishing)
Written and designed by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr

You can purchase CY_Borg here 

You can download the CY_litary De.file_ment solo rules here

Cyberpunk is a broader genre than I typically give it credit for. In literature, you can see cyberpunk’s roots form with authors like Phillip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, and it came to fruition in the early 1990s with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Within film, some of the earliest examples are movies like Escape From New York, Tron, and Blade Runner – all wildly different takes on the idea of humanity, technology, and dystopian futures. This would eventually lead to movies like Robocop, Hackers, The Matrix, and more – again, such diverse takes on the same base genre. Cyberpunk has a strong presence in anime and manga. Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Battle Angel Alita are prominent examples. While cyberpunk is considered a subgenre of science fiction, it is even blended with other diverse subgenres. From my perspective, and I think this is the consensus, the cyberpunk element that puts it over the edge is a dystopian future world where capitalism has become an immensely oppressive force, where debt is used to make people into a new kind of slave.

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Comic Book Review – Daredevil & Elektra: The Woman Without Fear and The Red Fist Saga Volume One

Daredevil: The Woman Without Fear
Reprints Daredevil: The Woman Without Fear #1-3 and Elektra #100
Written by Chip Zdarsky & Ann Nocenti
Art by Rafael De Latorre & Sid Kotian

Daredevil & Elektra by Chip Zdarsky Volume One: The Red Fist Saga
Reprints Daredevil (2022) #1-5
Written by Chip Zdarsky
Art by Marco Checchetto and Rafael De Latorre

Marvel Comics has been doing something for about the last decade or more that really bothers me. It’s become a trend that even DC Comics has started for most books. When a writer ends their run on an ongoing book, the company cancels the title and reboots it a month or two later with a new #1 to signal a new writer. I get the economics of it; issue ones sell better than any other issue, but it partially destroys the sense of history. Thankfully, DC has spared Action and Detective comics from this, so they bear their original numbering, making them over 1,000 issues. Both companies might put a Legacy number under the issue number, denoting how long this character has appeared in a book on their own. 

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Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Glide

Glide (Sleepy Sasquatch Games)
Written and designed by Cody Barr

You can purchase Glide here.

For the first time, we had an instance of a solo game that did not click for me at all. I had wanted to play something in the style of Dune. I’d seen the second half of the feature film adaptation and was reading Frank Herbert’s novel. Glide is based on the same source material, so it seemed a perfect fit. However, this is an excellent lesson in theme vs. gameplay. A game can be based on or inspired by something you enjoy, but the gameplay design might differ from what you were looking for. In my case, this was more about exploration & resource management and very little about developing a narrative.

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May 2024 Posting Schedule

Film Series

[Meet Ernst Lubitsch – May 1st thru 16th]
Trouble in Paradise, Design For Living, The Merry Widow, Angel, Ninotchka, To Be Or Not To Be, Heaven Can Wait, Cluny Brown

[Sight & Sound Sampling – May 20th thru 30th] – some of the films voted by filmmakers & critics as the best of all-time, catching upon some movies I should definitely see
Do The Right Thing, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Au hasard Balthazar, M, The Piano, Sherlock Jr.

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Movie Review – Design for Living

Design for Living (1933)
Written by Noel Coward & Ben Hecht
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

With Ernst Lubitsch’s penchant for directing films based on stage plays, it made sense that Noel Coward’s work would eventually cross his desk. Coward was a gay man living in a time where being out was a perilous move, so he was never publicly open about his sexuality. However, when you see him acting or in an interview, it becomes pretty apparent he is not straight. Because Coward was both queer and an artist, the people who regularly crossed his path also lived outside society’s rigid norms. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were two acting friends of Coward’s with whom he became very close. He promised that one day he would write a play about them, and when they were famous, they would star in it. This play would be about an unconventional relationship between three people and would eventually be adapted into this Hollywood feature film.

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Movie Review – Trouble in Paradise

Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Written by Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, and Ernst Lubitsch
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Ernst Lubitsch turned his back on his father’s tailoring business to go into movies. Lubitsch was a German-born Ashkenazi Jew. By age 19, he was a member of a prestigious German theater, and two years later, he made his screen debut. After appearing in 30 films between 1912 and 1920, Lubitsch realized his passion was not in performing but as a writer and director. He garnered international acclaim with his German films. Of his three films released in 1921, all three ended up on The New York Times’ top movies list. By the end of 1921, Lubitsch was sailing to the United States, where he would begin a prolific career that would serve to influence other filmmakers, from Alfred Hitchcock to Billy Wilder to Martin Scorsese and more. The thing that makes Lubitsch’s work stand out from his contemporaries is maturity, particularly an acceptance that human beings have and enjoy sex.

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