Movie Night: The Contest
Did you watch The Sentinel??
Did you watch The Sentinel? To see the original contest announcement, please click here.
It was a homework assignment, people. Like Rosemary’s Baby and Burnt Offerings, the film is a great blend of old Hollywood actors and new ones. It’s a cycle story, based on a best-selling book in the golden age of ’70s horror.
But for our purposes, it contains repeating objects that morph and escalate the plot. Again and again, we get tight insert shots of little items. Can you name them all?
What’s at stake is a lavish collection of Easter stuff. Candy, a rabbit, that stuff. All for the one person who—first—names the key morphing object that represents the entire metaphor of the story. Please, don’t just say the item. Please give a little detail about why your item is the central metaphor.
This is sounding like a school assignment, sorry. But it’s a good way to become aware of objects and how they appear and disappear and change throughout a story.
You have until Tuesday, April 4th, to enter your Comments.
I’ll be judging the Monkees contest soon. So go for it.
I'm not going to say yeah or nay. I'll let people battle it out until Tuesday.
The handkerchief. It begins as white, in Michael's hands, doing close up magic with Alison when her mother rings about her father. Alison's mother then has the white handkerchief dabbing at her eyes. Handkerchief then morphs to red in the hand and round the neck of the guy on Alison's photoshoots both times before she collapsed. Charles Chasen also uses a red handkerchief to cover her eyes before his party. Handkerchief becomes blue in Michael's top pocket and used again for close up magic at a party. Finally the next prospective male tenant has a white handkerchief he presses to his lips. This morphing object tracks the 'horse' of illusion, deception and escape seen in close up magic, Houdini posters, and the posters of Alison in Britain: familiar but alien. The colours white, red and blue are very All American, but also white for innocence, red for temptation and blue for redemption which Mary wears in pictures and nuns often do. So the cycle is innocence, Hell's temptation and God's salvation.