![]() Daydreaming daughter of a butcher (Donald Crisp, in one of his best roles) Velvet Brown meets a vagabond named Mike (Rooney), and together they find a wild horse she names Pie. In the decade since “prestige TV” surpassed popular cinema’s cultural capital, the latter has barely put up a fight, losing sight ever more every year of the two bedrocks of the form: images and time.Ī film like National Velvet could be remade today with no changes and be a hit (with Julia Butters in the Elizabeth Taylor role). If your characters are good enough, you can get away with shitty camerawork on TV-as with Succession, and Kate Winslet on Mare of Easttown-but movies are not uniform tubes to stick plot information into, like TV episodes. Movies like Cruella and Eternals-both PG-13 but made for children-look terrible, with no sense of space, lighting, production design, or camera strategy. Popular cinema has been failing audiences for years. Technical mumbo jumbo to most, but this is the way that the entire audience receives the work, and when it’s well made and with purpose, they feel it even if they don’t know it. The camera’s the most important character in any movie, and when you destroy its ability to speak and comment and counterpose by constantly cutting from every conceivable angle, you’ve stopped making movies and started making moving pictures of people talking. I’ve written before about visually incoherent TV shows and movies that give the viewer no sense of space or any kind of direction or mind at all behind the camera. Not even MGM was this boneheaded when it came to reality. Everything must be green-screened and controlled, from ancient arenas to pizza parlors. There’s no uncanny valley effect common to CGI work, or the lifeless trash put out by Netflix or, inexplicably, Marvel, where they can’t even be bothered to go and film in a real bar for a simple dialogue scene. The best MGM movies from the mid-20th century are intoxicating from minute-one because they look so incredible and more real than real. National Velvet is in league with these movies: there isn’t a missed note, and you could-and should-show it to your kids.Īgain, I may be talking about a hugely popular movie for young girls as if it’s some personal discovery, but Warner Archive just released the movie on Blu-ray for the first time, and like all Technicolor films on Blu-ray, it looks astonishing. Louis, too, and maybe the feverish colors made an impression, conscious or not. No need to go on about Dorothy and the gang, but you’ve seen the movie, and you know what it looks like. Although children’s entertainment ages just as poorly with the general public as most media made after 1970, the exceptions are notable and similar-namely The Wizard of Oz, another three-strip Technicolor masterpiece. ![]() I’m sure this movie is very popular with certain children and “horse girls,” but like The Ten Commandments, unless you’re part of that cult, you probably haven’t seen it. Even in the legacies of its stars (Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney), National Velvet is just one more hurdle passed in long careers full of more prominent successes. Brown’s National Velvet is hardly an obscure movie, but it’s not talked about or discussed nearly as much as any of Minnelli’s contemporary melodramas. ![]() Louis is perhaps the best example of a live action movie that feels heightened, hyper-saturated, and more real than real, purely through practical effects (in Minnelli’s case, the outrageously beautiful sets and costumes). You could also look at almost any Vincente Minnelli movie from the 1940s, 1950s, and early-1960s, or anything shot in three-strip Technicolor, and Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. The two-foot-square (0.18 square meter), 115-pound (52 kg) marble slab is inscribed in an early Hebrew script called Samaritan and most likely adorned a Samaritan synagogue or home in the ancient town of Jabneel, Palestine, which is now Yavneh in modern Israel, according to Michaels.Anyone with any real conviction that computer-generated images have made movies better must watch 1944’s National Velvet. Where are the Ten Commandments tablets today? According to Christian belief, the Ten Commandments are important rules from God that tell Christians how to live. How important are the 10 commandments to Christians?Ĭhristians believe that because of his omnibenevolent nature, God gives human beings instructions on how to live a good life and get to Heaven after they die. God will judge Jews on how well they have observed these commandments. The Ten Commandments still hold great significance for Jews today for many reasons: Following the Ten Commandments is part of the covenant made at Mount Sinai, which applies to all Jews.
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