Nicholas Bruner's Blog, page 17

Scary Movies: Nosferatu

Back to our regularly scheduled October slate of horror movies, and this week we have Nosferatu, a German silent film from 1922. It’s a movie I’ve seen three or four times over the years. Nosferatu is closely based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, though the names and some details have been changed. Nonetheless, it adheres so closely to the original story that Stoker’s estate sued the movie studio, Prana, which went into bankruptcy as a result and never made another film.

Hutter, a young work...

Scary Movies: Atom Age Vampire

‘Tis the season of scary movies, including ones I’m not scheduled to watch. It was about 8:30 last night and I decided on a whim to watch Atom Age Vampire, which is included on one of my collections of “50 Horror Classics” and such things, cheap collections of movies in the public domain. This particular film is an Italian horror film released in 1960 in Italy, and dubbed into English and released in the US in 1963.

I realized about ten minutes into it I had seen the movie before. I think wha...

Ranking The Twilight Zone

I love ranking things! I rank horror movies, James Bond movies, and comic book movies. Now the time has come for a new ranking challenge: The Twilight Zone. I’m (re-)watching the episodes with my daughter, who’s helping me. For now, I only intend to do the original series. I have a number of TZ DVDs, and I’ll start with those episodes. Perhaps later I’ll move on to other episodes from Netflix or perhaps even one of the 1980s or more recent series.

Like those other categories of rankings, I’ll...

Scary Movies: The Lost Boys

The movie this week is one I haven’t seen since I was an early teen-ager, and it’s one I’ve been wanting to re-watch it for some time to see how it holds up. And I think it held up pretty well! Even today, it still comes across as stylish and briskly-paced.

It follows Michael (about 17) and Sam (about 13), who are traveling with their recently-divorced mother, Lucy, to their new home in Santa Carla, California (a fairly obvious stand-in for Santa Cruz). They’ll be staying with their grandfath...

Scary Movies: Dracula

October already! And as every October, I force my children to watch scary movies with me. This year, the theme is vampires, and our first movie is Dracula, released by Universal in 1931. I hardly feel like I need to describe this one, as it’s a cultural touchstone. Bela Lugosi plays Count Dracula, a guy who really likes capes and blood. He hosts Renfield, an English real estate agent, at his spooky castle in Transylvania, where he signs the papers for a property near London, as well as sucking R...

What I’m Reading: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

I haven’t read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream since I was a freshman in college, and when my father recently told me he was re-reading it, I decided to follow suit. It’s a short play, but packs a lot of plot and characters into those relatively few pages. To refresh your own memory: Duke Theseus and Hippolyta (from Greek mythology) are to be married three days hence in Athens. Meanwhile, beauteous Hermia and young Lysander are in love with each other, but Hermia’s father has ordered Her...

What I’m Reading: My Turn at Bat

My Turn at Bat is the 1969 autobiography of Ted Williams (with writing help from Sports Illustrated writer John Underwood), who as a kid wanted to be the greatest hitter who ever lived, and largely achieved his goal. Notice, he did not want to be the greatest player who ever lived. In the book, he suggests that Joe DiMaggio holds that title, able to hit, run, and field, and all done with consummate style. Ted freely concedes his shortcomings as a left fielder, especially in his early years, and ...

What I’m Reading: One of Us Is Lying

One of Us Is Lying is a clever YA mystery by Karen M. McManus. It starts with five teenagers headed to detention after school. By the end of detention, one of the five is dead, and the other four all have a motive for wanting him gone. Which is the murderer, and can the ones not responsible clear their names?

The victim is Simon Kelleher,, who runs an app called About That. About That posts gossip from around Bayview High. It has a nasty tone and is never wrong. Simon is the most hated person...

What I’m Reading: The Picture of Dorian Gray

So I read Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest back in high school and found it amusing, but it did nothing to prepare me for this. I mean, I knew the premise of the story, of course–that Dorian Gray has a painting of himself that ages while he remains the same age. But what I didn’t realize is that this is a real horror book, with murder and suspense, even a fairly seedy scene in an opium den.

Dorian Gray starts off as a young aristocrat who’s so unusually handsome that everybody is...

Ranking From Russia With Love

I previously ranked some of the James Bond movies here, here, here, here, here, and here. I haven’t seen this one since high school and have long meant to re-watch it, since I remember it as one of the better Bond films. And I was right! It just felt classic, with a tight plot and some cool scenes. We’ll see how it does under this blog’s Bond-rating rubric.

Since the Bond movies are formulaic and their quality is based on how well they fulfill the formula, I created a little rubric to rank th...