So tired I can barely keep my eyes open, but I'll try to jabber away in a semi-coherent fashion until I finish the blog. My eyes are burning from all the smoke in the air, and my nose is stuffy and throat a little raw for the same reason, but at least we had good singing in church this morning. We got to sing a hymn called "Be Still, My Soul" with music by Sibelius. I had never sung it before but I recognised the melody, which is from "Finlandia". The Christian Hymn just has different words put to it that were written in the 18th century. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard and I really enjoyed singing it with the choir.
After church I drove out to Burbank to take my sister Sophie shopping. Her local Ralphs was jam-packed. Burbank is funny because the streets are quiet compared to my end of the Valley. You don't see anywhere near the traffic we have in Northridge. But go into a store - grocery or otherwise (like Target) - and you discover where all the people are. In Burbank, they're all in the stores, and there's a million of them. :)
I didn't do any walking for the second day in a row. My legs will sure be rested when the smoke eventually clears, and they'll be so rarin' to go that my walk will turn into a run.
Wait a minute. Scratch that; I hate running. :)
I don't mind walking rapidly, though, and sometimes when Grimsley comes with me on my CSUN walks he complains that I keep getting ahead of him. I reply that I can only walk just so slowly, and that I am going as slow as I can, and then at a certain point I will just turn around and walk backwards while going forward, so we can continue our conversation with me in the lead but facing him.
I can't walk slow, sorry. It comes from trying to keep up with my parents when I was little. Dad used to talk about "30 mile marches" in the military, and he had that March Stride down pat, at least until he got older. When they were younger, Mom would match his pace, and little kid me would try to keep up. That's why I walk so fast. Plus, I'm hyper to begin with (holy moly, Ad, you've gotta slow down sometimes). And I do that too. I try to have at least 20-30 minutes of meditation every afternoon. Not the "official" kind of meditation, more like just the quiet kind, lying down with no external stimuli, quieting the mind and concentrating on breathing. Try it, it's a stress reducer.
Tonight's movie was a mega-epic, "The King Of Kings" (1927). We were back with Cecil B. DeMille once again to finally watch his Silent masterpiece, which was also the movie that premiered on the opening night of Grauman's Chinese Theater. "King Of Kings" is another of those movies that you'd have thought I'd have seen but actually hadn't, and since we broke the DeMille ice with "The Sign Of The Cross" last week, I figured we might as well keep going. Now, "King Of Kings" is about the Passion and has all the traditional story elements in it's script, so it's really more of a movie for Easter, but I found a copy of it at Chatsworth Libe yesterday afternoon and thought of DeMille, and tonight was the perfect night to watch because it is a long movie (155 minutes) that I normally would not have time to watch, but I wasn't gonna go on my walk because of the fire smoke, so I did have time. All the stars aligned.
"The King Of Kings" is thee Biblical Epic of the Passion as far as I am concerned. The Jeffery Hunter version is very good, but this one is the best. Now that I've seen his performance, there is no substitute for H.B. Warner as Jesus. He holds the center of the entire film with a measured, serene performance that has almost none of the Silent film facial gesturing usually seen by actors of that era. Playing Jesus Christ with manic expression wouldn't be appropriate, so Warner leaves the emoting to his disciples and to Mary Magdalene. As an aside, it is interesting to note how different the acting styles are in two DeMille films just five years apart. "The Sign Of The Cross" plays like a full-fledged modern sound film, in fact a blockbuster that would hold up today. But a mere five years earlier, in "The King Of Kings", the acting is purely from the Silent era, with the accompanied gesturing and body language.
It strikes me how specific the direction must have been for Silent pictures, in order to get the plot across. There was no sound and no dialogue, so the director had to make sure the actors were conveying the story with their faces and bodies. And they had title cards to fill in the gaps.
But just five years later, DeMille has seemingly mastered the sound format, and so have his actors, and they make another Biblical Epic ("Sign Of The Cross") that seems light years ahead technologically. So I guess the kicker (if I've made any sense) is that not only DeMille but his actors too, were practised and ready to jump into the Sound Era, and were ready to use their voices to speak dialogue, to tell the story with words instead of facial expressions. It had to be a sea change, and yet in this case, with the two movies mentioned, the actors seem to have jumped right into it. I would love to know a little bit more about the transition from Silent to Sound, and how - if at all - the actors and directors were prepped for it.
But yeah, make sure you watch "The King Of Kings" at some point, maybe next Easter. The cinematography is very advanced for 1927, and the sets are magnificent. The budget for "Kings" was 2.5 million. You surely see every dollar of that budget on the screen, in the sets, costumes, and......special effects! Yes, you get some magical lighting wizardry and double exposure manipulation near the end of the film that is astonishing for 1927. I watched these scenes with an eye toward the history of film, this time very impressed with what DeMille was able to achieve in order to present the full supernatural aspects of the life of Jesus Christ.
Two Thumbs Up, one of the greatest Silent Films ever made and perhaps it shoutld be considered one of the greatest films of any kind ever made. I cannot recommend it highly enough, not only for it's content but also because of it's history as one of the first truly epic movies. See it to continue your education in film.
That's all I know for tonight. I will now hopefully get some sleep unless I start thinking about that Tremblay book....... ;)
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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