Screening Log
This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.
October 2007 activity
Total Log Entries: 46
- Adam (12)
- Chet (0)
- Chiranjit (0)
- Cullen (0)
- David (0)
- Eva (2)
- Evan (0)
- Ian (18)
- Jenny (1)
- Katherine (0)
- Leo (1)
- Megan (1)
- Rumsey (7)
- Teddy (2)
- Thomas (2)
- Victoria (0)
Total Comments: 12
- The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman (0)
- Les Enfants Terribles (0)
- 3:10 To Yuma (0)
- The Kingdom (0)
- Orchestra Rehearsal (0)
- The Voice of the Moon (0)
- Ginger and Fred (0)
- No Country for Old Men (0)
- The Wicker Man (0)
- 28 Days Later (0)
- Braindead (0)
- Shaun of the Dead (0)
- Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death… and Insects (0)
- Project Grizzly (0)
- The Host (0)
- My Super Ex-Girlfriend (0)
- Crazy Love (0)
- Freaks (0)
- Cat People (1)
- Toby Dammit (0)
- The Temptations of Doctor Antonio (0)
- A Marriage Agency (0)
- 4 (0)
- The Bridge (0)
- Severance (0)
- The Clowns (0)
- Amarcord (0)
- City of Women (0)
- Boys and Girls (0)
- Breaking and Entering (0)
- The Proposition (1)
- The Baron of Arizona (0)
- I Shot Jesse James (0)
- Little Miss Sunshine (0)
- No Country for Old Men (1)
- Avida (7)
- Dragon Wars (1)
- The Boss of it All (0)
- L’Iceberg (0)
- Lust, Caution (0)
- Bonnie And Clyde (0)
- The Alps (1)
- Eastern Promises (0)
- Zoo (0)
- Lenny (0)
- Klute (0)
Full Archive
Cat People / USA / 1942
A guy has got to be pretty head-over-heels in love to marry a woman who won’t even let him kiss her. But if the woman was Simone Simon, and she looked up at you with those radiant teary eyes, you might marry her too. Simon plays Irina, a Serbian immigrant convinced that any passionate encounter will turn her into a panther, due to a curse placed on her village generations ago. Her new husband, Oliver, is convinced that she’s crazy and that psychotherapy will help her. Meanwhile, though, they’re sleeping in separate bedrooms (Irina believes that even a kiss will make her turn and maul her husband to death), and after a tense few months of marriage Oliver starts to notice that the cute no-nonsense woman he works with is probaby more his type anyway. But when Irina suspects that her husband might be less than faithful— well, you know what’s bound to happen.
Executed with lots of style, many gorgeous shots, and a keen eye for the innocuously scary detail, this movie does a nice job maintaining tension over time, though there are fewer big-money scares than one might expect or wish for. The look of the film is particularly masterful given its apparently tiny budget— though after its success, Tourneur was out of the low-budget ghetto for good. Moody and almost gothic, Cat People is the sort of stylized horror film that you don’t see done quite this well anymore. Be sure not to blink during Simon’s bewitching penultimate scenes. It’s all almost too gorgeous to be scary at all.
by Megan Weireter | Source: TCM
15 Oct 2007 1:38 PM | Comments (1)
stephane / 10 November 2007 / 3:13 AM
The sequel, ‘Curse of the Cat People’, is also fantastic — very dreamlike, though that might partly be because I watched it at 3am on TCM once. I can’t imagine a current film using the ‘ghost dead mom’ plot without it resulting in schmaltz overload, but it works well in this film.