Saturday, March 16, 2024

Joe Camp, RIP


Joe Camp died yesterday at age 84. He made the Benji movies including Oh, Heavenly Dog starring Chevy Chase. Also made a mystery, The Double McGuffin.

I saw Benji in a theater back in 1974. I must have been 11 and it bothered me that the dog wasn't really an actor and didn't understand the storyline he was acting out. Bob Barker once said it was his favorite movie and, according to IMDb, it was a "guilty pleasure" of Alfred Hitchcock.

One of the sequels, Benji the Hunted, was attacked by Michael Medved who lashed out against it because Benji doesn't come when his owner calls him and stays in the woods to save some orphaned baby animals.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Bowanga, Bowanga (1951)

Three white guys are abducted by white African women in two piece swimsuits.

A little more realistic than similar films. The women barely speak English and it takes place in a desert rather than a jungle. Good-size women. They beat up the men.

"You don't think they're cannibals, do you?"

"...They could be treacherous in other ways."

Not much you can say about it. The women must have been wrestlers.

Available on Pub-D-Hub.


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Ishtar (1987) Elaine May


I have two brothers who are jazz musicians and they and their musician friends loved this movie. They thought the bad lyrics were hilarious. There are amateur musicians who record in the same studios the professionals use, and most of them are very nice people. The professional musicians like them and get along with them, but their songs are not good. We can't be geniuses at everything.

And I'll mention this. Some years ago, Natalie Portman railed against Woody Allen:

“I don’t think that’s what the conversation should be about. I think it should be about: Why didn’t Elaine May make a movie every year? Why didn’t Nora Ephron make a movie every year?"

She was right that there should be more women filmmakers, but Woody Allen makes a movie a year because his sister goes to Europe and raises money year after year. He apparently stays within his budget. Elaine May, on the other hand, made Ishtar for $55 million, nearly $150 million today, far more than Woody Allen's ever spent, and this was, as Warren Beatty put it, a gift to her to give her a chance to show what she could do as a director. He was grateful to her for the work she put into re-writing a couple of his movies, Heaven Can Wait and Reds. She also did a re-write on Hoffman's movie, Tootsie.

Two painfully bad singer-songwriters (Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman) travel to north African to perform and find the country crawling with CIA on the verge of revolution. With Charles Grodin. It wasn't great but it wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be at the time. It was attacked for being so expensive which, Beatty argued, shouldn't be the audience's concern.

Available on The Criterion Channel.


Friday, March 8, 2024

John Wayne, Brannigan (1975)


My impression was that this and McQ were attempts by John Wayne to be another Dirty Harry. He kicks in doors and says, "Knock knock." He threatens and beats information out of people. He's looking for a racketeer (John Vernon, the mayor from Dirty Harry) who fled to England when he was indicted in Chicago. Brannigan flies to the U.K. to bring him back but finds that he's been kidnapped.

The joke is that the British cops are so by-the-book and Brannigan is so tough and plays by his own rules. He carries a gun which he has no right to do in Britain. There's a barroom brawl that's like something from a western, people punching each other and breaking chairs over their heads without  anyone being hurt or killed.

Draft dodger John Waye keeps claiming to have been in London during the war. Young people today don't seem to know that World War Two veterans hated John Wayne for staying out of the war.

There's kind of a romantic thing between John Wayne and a much younger English policewoman.

It was interesting to see England in the mid-70's but not with John Wayne walking around. Although, now that I think about it, I had a friend in high school who loved this movie.

McQ had a better ending. Filmed around Seattle, it had a car chase down a beach. The thrilling climax here is just John Wayne shooting at a Jaguar.

Free on Tubi.


Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966)


And why SHOULDN'T Jesse James meet Frankenstein's daughter, allthough I think it was actually his granddaughter. The Cartwrights on Bonanza met Charles Dickins. 

I never understood Jesse James' appeal. There was an episode of The Brady Bunch where Peter, misled by movies, became an admirer. Mike and Carol introduce him to an old man whose father was murdered by Jesse James. They could have just told Peter that Jesse James was a Confederate, a traitorous racist monster. 

Frankstein's granddaughter has left Vienna and come to America to an area where electrical storms are more common. She needs that electricity to bring dead guys back to life.

The movie wasn't that awful. Directed by old B movie director William Beaudine.

Free on Tubi.

 

Richard Lewis on cinema

 Quote from the late Richard Lewis found on Counterpunch.com:

I’m obsessive-compulsive. For example, I can watch John Cassavetes’s films over and over again. When I used to date women much younger than me, I would put them through training periods—”This is Ingmar Bergman week,” “This is Stanley Kubrick week.” It was very controlling, because they had to enjoy what I enjoyed. I see now how foolish and crazy and narcissistic it was. I like dark films. There’s a French film called The Mother and the Whore [1973]. It came out about a year after Last Tango in Paris [1972], which blew my mind and frightened me because it’s all about fear of intimacy. When I watch Marlon Brando in that movie now and I realize that I’m so much older now than he was when he was in it . . . Even though I got married, I still have . . . you know, those shadows followed me, those intimacy problems. The Mother and the Whore, though, was directed by Jean Eustache. He was this guy who came after the French New Wave and who wound up committing suicide. Jean-Pierre LĂ©aud, who was one of my favorite actors, is in the movie. So I come home one night and I’m watching this film and I’m saying, “God, it looks like a [Bernardo] Bertolucci movie. It’s so dark. But I’ve never seen Jean-Pierre in a movie like this.” And it went on and on. It’s a masterpiece. It’s the greatest film I’ve ever seen on the Madonna-whore complex. So I do obsess over these films—I watch them over and over because, I guess, I sort of feel less alone and less crazy when I see some of these works of darkness.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed convicted of manslaughter


Acquitted of destroying evidence for allegedly disposing of some cocaine.

Watched a couple of YouTube videos discussing the case. There were questions about where the live ammunition came from and there was footage of Alec Baldwin shooting a scene firing a gun then demanding the armorer hurry and reload so they could do a retake. If he wanted to rush it, they should have skipped the re-takes. It was only a western. How good does it need to be? 

She's facing a maximum 18 month sentence.

Why even use real guns? They have to use fake guns anyway when they have an actor who's a convicted felon. There was a scene in this movie where a 13-year-old fires a gun and accidentally kills a man and they didn't use a blank---they added smoke and muzzle flash digitally.

I know I'm repeating myself but actors have been killed and injured firing blanks on movie sets before. Bruce Willis suffered hearing loss on the set of a Die Hard movies by firing blanks in a closed space. And there was the time that real, fully functional submachine guns were stolen from the set of The Untouchables around 1960.

I still want to know if that film professor had any second thoughts about demanding that college kids use only real guns in their student films.