Friday, November 02, 2012

Fritz Lang, Vocabulary Builder

Il Teatro Buce featured a screening the other night of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, spruced up and reassembled from its original 1927 version.  It was a first for me--or so I thought, until I kicked back and actually watched, and found that here is Patient Zero for the modern cultural vocabulary.  You want Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton?  Here they are in spirit, if not in the flesh.  You want Batman?--I mean Batman the way I saw him when I waited my turn in the barber shop around 1945?  Yeh, we got Batman?  You want Smithers and Mister Burns, hoo boy have we got Smithers and Mr. Burns.

Indeed the cultural resonances come so thick and fast that you can barely see your way through them to the movie. Which is perhaps just as well because best I can tell, it is actually a pretty terrible movie.  Fun to watch, though.

1 comment:

dilbert dogbert said...

Hey Buce, Just read this review in the FT and remembered your review.
Might be of interest to you.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/59c566d0-241a-11e2-9509-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2BAAO1Dx0

best