Making Prime Work

NOTE: This is the start of a very intermittent series on this blog, wherein I review anything I may have watched, read, or otherwise gained from our Amazon Prime membership. This is partly to continue justifying the cost of Amazon Prime as it takes yet another leap, and to remind me what a wonderful cornucopia of media there is out there that I have yet to witness, or re-witness as the case may be.

Part One: Spooky Skeletons.

The House on Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price and a cast of others I didn’t recognize. This great film felt like a tour through a spook alley: The creaky doors, the lightning and thunder, the bubbling vat of acid you knew was going to play a part in the climax, and the guns presented in little coffins to the guests. Plenty of twists and turns, all of which you see coming, but a pleasant enough film without the gore that’s sadly become part of the horror genre these days. Not that I watch horror these days. 

Aside from Price, the rest of the cast was pretty throwaway, though it was easy to pick out Robert Mitchum’s sister, due to the family resemblance. Who they were, how old they are, etc., really didn’t matter, either to us nor to them. They didn’t know each other and were there only to fill certain roles secondary to the story. Put any actor in any of the roles, you get the same output.

Part Two: Mia Farrow Can’t Sing

The Last Unicorn, starring Mia Farrow, Christopher Lee and many, many others, all done in an interesting mix of Rankin/Bass and putative Studio Ghibli. I’ll be honest, this story is meh at best. I’m not exactly sure why it’s a cult classic, but I will give it cult classic status because I don’t have to like it for the cult to survive. I do know that Mia Farrow doesn’t have much of a singing voice. Also, I heard that Christopher Lee approached the role of King Haggard with some reverence, even bringing in a copy of the book in which he’d marked dialogue that HAD to be in the movie. I’m not sure if it was his character’s dialogue or what, but I kept waiting for him to say something of note. Not much happened.

Oh, but there is Rene Auberjonois as the skeleton. That’s something I remember from watching this show as a kid:

This story/cartoon version shows something telling about characters, at least the eccentric ones. The butterfly at the beginning of the movie, ugh. If I’da been there, I would’ve skooshed him. But the skeleton. There’s a reason he sticks out in my mind, dredged up in memories from childhood. You knew somebody like the skeleton. Jokey and a bit scary too. Kinda like that one uncle you only saw once in a great while, the uncle whose English was just bad enough you didn’t know if you’d be able to communicate with him, and as a shy child, the best you could do was run past. I remember those days too.

Part Three: Elvis Has Entered the Building

A friend on Facebook recommended I see Elvis & Nixon, an “Amazon Original” film telling the fictionalized story of that infamous photo of Elvis Presley meeting Richard Milhous Nixon, seeing as I was on yet another Nixon bender on Facebook.

So I looked it up. The FIRST movie watched for free via Prime.

So glad I did.

Preface: Yes, it stars Kevin Spacey. I don’t believe in salting the earth once an individual has been found exceptionally guilty. Besides, Spacey does the best Nixon outside of, well, Richard M. Nixon himself.

On the surface, this film does what it promises: It tells a truthy version of what led up to that infamous Nixon/Presley photo.  On the down-low, it tells, through Presley’s eyes, a tale of woe for those who crave fame, seek it, and find it. He laments at one point that he’s not sure who he is anymore, that little boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, or Elvis, the King, with the gold jewelry and the mansion and the acts in Vegas and all. He longs to reconnect, but finds it impossible in a world that only wants to see Elvis the Legend, not Elvis the man. That’s a message, ironically, that Nixon himself should have heard. So color this Nixon fan impressed with this movie. Though you should be prepared for absolutely no Elvis music whatsoever. Though they do play this song over the end credits, which is a great fit to the underpinning story:

Then there’s Mister Rogers and Me, discussed here.

A few movies makes the Prime price still pretty hard to justify. But there’s more to come.