Numero zero (France, 1971)

 

A documentary. The director, Jean Eustache, talks with his grandmother, Odette Robert. She sits at a table wearing sunglasses and talks fast about her life. She must have been born in 1900 and was only 71 when this movie was made. She led a difficult life. Her mother died when she was seven, she had an abusive stepmother, she married a guy who turned out to be a swinger. She mentions men in her family who fought in World War One and later, World War Two. One was put in a concentration camp. There were tragedies in her family, deaths of children and old people. It sounded like she was related to some terrible people but a lot of that was due to unwise marriages.

I tried to picture my old hillbilly relatives doing this. The ones I knew are almost gone now, but as far as I know they led happier lives or at least got along with each other. I'm closer to the grandmother's age than the director's. If it were me, I wouldn't have had nearly as much to tell.

An hour and fifty-two minutes. Available on the Criterion Channel. 

Carl Erik Rinsch arrested

Director Carl Erik Rinsch was arrested for defrauding Netflix of millions of dollars that was supposed to go to a science fiction series he was making. They spent millions, then he asked for another $11 million to finish the series but instead invested the money, lost half of it, then invested what was left in cryptocurrency and did pretty well. But he then bought several Rolls Royces and a Ferrari and a large amount of high priced furniture.

I never heard of him. He directed TV commercials and the movie 47 Ronin which had a $144 million budget. I looked him up on Wikipedia and it sounds like the poor guy was out of his mind or at least had an amphetamine addiction. Good luck to him.

The story should be inspiring to film students and those who wish they were. An inexperienced director got $144 million to direct a movie. It wasn't very good, but Netflix still gave him millions more to make a TV series. I'm also amazed how much he made investing in crypto "currency".

That Kind of Girl (UK, 1963)

A very blond Austrian au pair working in England goes out with a number of men and picks up a venereal disease.

"What do the Austrians think of Hitler?" a young fellow cheerfully asks her. 

It was only 18 years after Hitler offed himself. It wasn't an unreasonable question. 

According to the certificate they show at the beginning of British movies, it was rated X. No one under sixteen admitted. No real sex or nakedness although we do see relatively young people swim in their 1963 English underwear. 

The movie looked beautiful, black and white, recently restored. We see swinging London with crowded streets and nightclubs. The girl joins an anti-nuclear march but wears inappropriate shoes and leaves early. She misses the bus back to London and a guy in an MG gives her a lift. She goes out with that guy later and is attacked by her jealous middle-aged boyfriend when he sees him drop her off. An English bobby chases the assailant. He gets away, but it was a good thing he attacked her because she goes to the police station where a policewoman insists she go to a health clinic where they find out she has syphilis. She's already spread it to another guy who's given it to his pregnant fiancee and thus to their unborn child.  

77 minutes. Free on Tubi.

Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

Set in 1955. I read that it was based loosely on the case of a German actress named Sybille Schmitz. 

About a washed up Nazi-era German movie star. She meets and starts sleeping with a newspaper sports reporter who wants to write an article on actors in her shoes. He discovers that she's being "treated" by a doctor who keeps her hooked on morphine so she can exploit her wealth. These things happen in a country full of "former" Nazis.

I looked up Sybille Schmitz on Wikipedia and surprised at how closely the movie followed her story. They kept saying it was "loosely" based on her but it wasn't as "loose" as I assumed.

In black & white. With a surprising amount of American country music. 

I've been looking at IMDb as I watch movies and have noticed how fleeting movie careers can be. Actors should prepare emotionally for having their careers grind to a halt.

I looked Sybille Schmitz up on IMDb and was surprised that I've seen three of her movies, G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), a silent movie starring Louise Brooks, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) and the Nazi version of Titanic (1943). 

Veronika Voss and Vampyr and maybe some others are available on The Criterion Channel.

I sent a man to prison

I had jury duty. I'd been called a few times before but I wasn't needed. One time I completely forgot about it and didn't show up. I guess they didn't need me that time, either, since there didn't seem to be a warrant out for my arrest. But, this time, they put me on a jury.

A 44-year-old man was charged with punching his girlfriend or former girlfriend who was also the mother of his two children. He had pounded on her bedroom door shouting obscene abuse at her. Their 11-year-old daughter was in her room directly across the hall so she heard all this, heard her mother cry out in pain and testified at the trial.

The defense didn't really challenge the victim or her daughter in cross-examination. The only defense witness, a retired doctor who now worked as a paid witness, testified that the bruise the victim suffered couldn't be from the defendant punching her because there was yellow around it, and that, according to a medical journal article published in the 1990's, took at lease 18 hours to form.

The prosecutor cross-examined the doctor and read from multiple medical journal articles which said that it was impossible to tell how old a bruise was, especially from a photograph where the color may not be accurate. 

A question is not evidence, so I wasn't sure how to regard the stuff the prosecutor was reading, but the doctor's only response was to accuse him of taking the quotes out of context. Which was true----quotes or excerpts are out of context by definition. The only question he really answered was whether it was possible to cause a bruise on top of another bruise. It was.

The doctor didn't seem that good, but I was reminded of the kindly old MD who testified on Paul Newman's side in The Verdict. I didn't doubt him, did I?

The defense rested. The prosecution called a rebuttal witness, a child abuse pediatrician. Child abuse cases were his specialty. Bruises, sadly, were his bread and butter. 

He was familiar with the study the other doctor cited. He said that information was no longer considered valid. Even the researcher who wrote it changed his mind. There is no way to tell how old a bruise was especially by looking at a photograph.

The defense attorney didn't give up. He began reading things from medical journals about bruising and asked the witness to confirm they were correct. I don't think the things he read had much to do with telling the age of a bruise, but he didn't think the jury would know that.

It made me think of the movie Trial and Error, aka Dock Brief. Peter Sellers plays a failed British lawyer who can't think of a reasonable defense for wife-killer Richard Attenborough so he makes no defense at all. In this case, the defense had been hopelessly crushed, but he didn't give up.

There was also a resisting arrest charge, him shouting obscenities at the cops and spitting on their shoes, which doesn't seem that bad. They had bodycam footage of everything and of the police talking to the victim. There was video of a long interview with the daughter about a month later.

We convicted the guy. The judge came back and talked to us when it was over. He was an old guy, completely bald. I didn't notice until then that he had an earring. He complained about the massive amount of bruise-related evidence. He had to read all the articles mentioned in the trial. He also told us that the defendant was already on probation for strangling the victim, he had been convicted of assaulting her before that and there had been a restraining order against him. Because of all that and the fact that he assaulted her in earshot of their child, he was facing up to five years in prison.

I had been worried about it. I didn't want to make a mistake and convict someone who didn't do it or acquit someone because I didn't know what reasonable doubt was, and even if he was guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, did I want to be the one to put him in the slam? Now I'm a little disturbed at how easy it was. 

The Childhood of a Leader (2015)

I didn't get the cause and effect relationship between the kid's childhood at the end of World War One and his growing up to be a fascist leader. The child in this movie has long hair, wears frilly clothes and people keep mistaking him for a girl. In this regard, he's more like a little Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt than Hitler. The movie is based on a story by Jean-Paul Sartre. I don't know what he was trying to say. I'm surprised that Sartre thought the kid saying he didn't believe in prayer made him a future Nazi. The kid was American, the son of an American diplomat. How did he end up as a Nazi-like dictator riding around in a Mercedes? It would probably have been a better movie if it had cut the ending where we see him as an adult.

I watched it on The Criterion Channel.

Franklin Roosevelt as child.

It reminded me of what Nabokov said about Sartre and Camus, that their novels' existentialist themes were tacked on rather than being the natural outcome of the story. I don't know how closely this movie stuck to Sartre's story, but the dictator thing was definitely tacked on at the end.

Ordinary People (1980)

I watched Ordinary People for the first time in four years. My reaction to it was different from last time. I had less sympathy for the rich people in it, not because they were rich but because the parents encouraged their sons to engage in dangerous but expensive hobbies, like sailing in a tiny sailboat. Even when one son dies in a boating accident, it didn't occur to them that it was a bad idea.

The surviving son blames himself for his brother's death and goes to a psychologist played by Judd Hirsch. The psychologist might have pointed out that his parents bought them the boat and didn't seem to have bothered with life jackets. 

In the Italian movie Son's Room (2001), an Italian psychologist's son dies in an accident. The father blames his patient. He was going to go jogging with his son that day but instead had to help a patient overcome his stagefright before a public speaking event. Since he wasn't going jogging, the son goes scuba diving with predictable results. 

This is what happens when rich people have "active lifestyles". 

I've written about this more than once, but I had a great uncle born in the 1880's. He was half Indian and had an uncanny ability to walk through the woods and find his way in total darkness. The trick is to look up at the stars. You can see where the trees are that way. But he had a terrible fear of going into the woods alone. 

One of his sons was about 6o when he got a degree in anthropology. I was at his graduation party and he was talking with guests about Indian lore, like what parts of a human body are left after being eaten by a bear. Nature is horrible. Horrible. But you have these rich people who go out there like they own the place, oblivious to the dangers.

I don't like being anywhere that I can't get an ambulance.