There's a department store in Bath, Maine, called Reny's, that sells — along with Everything Else in the World — criminally cheap (because they're almost certainly bootleg) DVDs of astonishing and obscure films. The stack I'm looking at right now includes:
**The Woman Hunter (1972 CBS Movie of the Week), starring Barbara Eden
** Kansas City Confidential! (1952): "It Explodes Like a Gun in Your Face!"
** A double feature with Susan Hayward in Tulsa (1949) and Jane Russell in The Outlaw (1943), which I guess makes it a quadruple feature, hyuk hyuk
PLUS
** The Great Guy (1936), starring James Cagney as a tough-as-nails agent of New York's Bureau of Weights and Measures.
**The Woman Hunter (1972 CBS Movie of the Week), starring Barbara Eden
** Kansas City Confidential! (1952): "It Explodes Like a Gun in Your Face!"
** A double feature with Susan Hayward in Tulsa (1949) and Jane Russell in The Outlaw (1943), which I guess makes it a quadruple feature, hyuk hyuk
PLUS
** The Great Guy (1936), starring James Cagney as a tough-as-nails agent of New York's Bureau of Weights and Measures.
Vi belegas!
But the film we watched last night was Incubus (1965), starring Canadian sensation, William Shatner, because who wouldn't want to see Shatner in the Between Years — post-Brothers Karamazov, pre-Star Trek — in a film described in drop shadow on the back of the DVD as:
"Utterly bizarre, yet strangely compelling, this artsy horror film demands to be experienced..."
Genre: Horror / Classic Black & White
English Subtitled
English subtitled? OK, maybe it's a Spaghetti Gothic. Come the credits, my friend, Clarke (also a product of the UC Berkeley Linguistics Deparment) and I start to wonder which the hell country this film was made in. There were plenty of Italian-looking words, but what was that Slavic "j" doing there? Croatian, maybe? Some speculating then lapsing of interest, then on comes the picture, something that would like very much to be Bergman and Fellini and Polanski all rolled into one. Then the characters started speaking and we snapped to attention.
"That's wrong! That's all wrong! That's a feminine article with a masculine noun and if this is some Slavic language why does that sound like a neuter German accusative word form?!" Then it hit me: Oh my god, I think this is in Esperanto!
Yes, Esperanto, the Klingon of the Gay 90s. The movie got instantly better from then on with Clarke and me waxing obnoxious over the insane, awkward regularity of the language and making Esperanto-inflected cracks to each other for the rest of the evening.
As an experiment, Esperanto was a lovely idea — one of international brotherhood and cooperation and is, indeed, quite a simple system to pick up, and as such, made it a target of totalitarian dictators who tend not to go for that sort of thing. Someone on Wikipedia writes that Hitler, whose birthday, coincidentally, was yesterday (122 years young), even mentioned Esperanto in Mein Kampf "as an example of the kind of language that would be used by an International Jewish Conspiracy once they achieved world domination."
Of course, I read that and thought, "Surely Hitler would have used a definite article to describe any kind of International Jewish Conspiracy."
Here's a clip from Incubus.
"Utterly bizarre, yet strangely compelling, this artsy horror film demands to be experienced..."
Genre: Horror / Classic Black & White
English Subtitled
English subtitled? OK, maybe it's a Spaghetti Gothic. Come the credits, my friend, Clarke (also a product of the UC Berkeley Linguistics Deparment) and I start to wonder which the hell country this film was made in. There were plenty of Italian-looking words, but what was that Slavic "j" doing there? Croatian, maybe? Some speculating then lapsing of interest, then on comes the picture, something that would like very much to be Bergman and Fellini and Polanski all rolled into one. Then the characters started speaking and we snapped to attention.
"That's wrong! That's all wrong! That's a feminine article with a masculine noun and if this is some Slavic language why does that sound like a neuter German accusative word form?!" Then it hit me: Oh my god, I think this is in Esperanto!
Yes, Esperanto, the Klingon of the Gay 90s. The movie got instantly better from then on with Clarke and me waxing obnoxious over the insane, awkward regularity of the language and making Esperanto-inflected cracks to each other for the rest of the evening.
As an experiment, Esperanto was a lovely idea — one of international brotherhood and cooperation and is, indeed, quite a simple system to pick up, and as such, made it a target of totalitarian dictators who tend not to go for that sort of thing. Someone on Wikipedia writes that Hitler, whose birthday, coincidentally, was yesterday (122 years young), even mentioned Esperanto in Mein Kampf "as an example of the kind of language that would be used by an International Jewish Conspiracy once they achieved world domination."
Of course, I read that and thought, "Surely Hitler would have used a definite article to describe any kind of International Jewish Conspiracy."
Here's a clip from Incubus.
For more artificial and superior linguistic fun, I give you SpongeGar (I apologize for the ads and the Nickelodeon sales monster):
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