Saturday, March 28, 2015

Jeremy Clarkson

They're talking about the terrible mistake the BBC made firing Jeremy Clarkson. ITV will snatch him up! But I doubt Clarkson will come out of this with his popularity unscathed. There are people who watched him in spite of how obnoxious and racist he was, and many will decide they can't stomach him anymore. It might start sinking in with some of the human garbage who are defending him that he threw a temper tantrum and attacked a man because hotel room service stopped serving hot food.

The English must have SOME self-respect left. They're already seen around the world as an inbred race of football hooligans. The world knows all about Jimmy Savile. The Brits finally started prosecuting some of the sadomasochistic pedophiles who ran their entire school system at least until the late 1980s. Do they really want Jeremy Clarkson to be the sagging, bulbous face of Great Britain?

Giant Gila Monster (1959)

The Giant Gila Monster wimped out. A 1950s horror movie. Rather bad in some respects. The special effects consisted of a Gila Monster walking around on a miniature set. You never see an actor in the same shot. Of course, that wouldn't have fooled anyone anyway. 

Young hot rodder Chase Winstead works as a mechanic, supporting his widowed mother, his disabled little sister and his French girlfriend in rural Texas. He's saving his money to buy leg braces for his sister so she'll be able to walk. He's also friends with the sheriff who seems to be the only cop in the area, and he's leader of the other hot rodders, making them behave.

And he's a singer. Doesn't have a band or anything, but he has a banjo-like ukelele.
 
The movie starts with two teens snuggling in their car when the Giant Gila monster attacks. The boy's father is an obnoxious rich guy who threatens the sheriff if he doesn't find his missing son. The sheriff then goes and talks to the girl's honest, decent, working class parents.

Chase Winstead's father was killed working on one of the rich guy's oil rigs.

In the end, the rich guy somehow has the power to fire the sheriff, take his badge and become sheriff himself.

Wouldn't the movie have been better if the rich guy had died a horrible death while Chase and the sheriff do nothing to help him?

The sheriff could say, "Let him bleed!" like Walter White.

Should Chase have been more tormented? Should he have had scenes in his room of him yelling at God, like Robert Duvall in The Apostle? He's a nice guy. Why must he suffer so?

You'd think that a giant poisonous lizard attacking cars and eating people would be enough to carry a movie, that you wouldn't need all the subplots.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Jeremy Clarkson, Jimmy Savile

You have to be pretty good-looking to be referred to as a "bad boy" instead of "a dick."
--J. Elvis Weinstein
So, the BBC learned its lesson. They spent decades covering up for pedophile, necrophile and probable child murderer Jimmy Savile and his pal, Rolf Harris. Harris is now in prison for child molesting.

They just fired violent racist BBC star Jeremy Clarkson. The British millionaire physically assaulted a producer, punching him repeatedly for thirty seconds until a witness intervened. Clarkson flew into a rage when the victim informed him that it was too late to get hot food from hotel room service. Clarkson couldn't have steak and chips.


Clarkson is 54. Rather astonishing. He doesn't look a day under 75.

Look at comments on the internet to see the kind of English scum that support Clarkson. They were attacking Clarkson's victim, calling for him to be murdered in some cases.

I'm beginning to wonder about the British. Jimmy Savile was their biggest celebrity. He was huge----able to get away with monstrous crimes. Can you imagine an American star so big that he would be allowed to spend the night in a morgue abusing the corpses?

And Savile was repulsive. Even if you didn't know he was a child molester, necrophile and murderer you would think he was repulsive. But the British looked at him and saw Cary Grant, Warren Beatty, Brad Pitt----and I don't now who else because I'm not really a judge of male beauty----all rolled into one.

And now we're finding out that the Brits love Jeremy Clarkson just as much. He's their one big star. This horrible, prematurely aged troll whose whole act is to be as obnoxious as possible. To them, he's a young Paul Newman. He's actually the BBC's biggest star, if you can believe that.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Kirk Cameron---he's just so dumb

Religious beliefs are mostly innocuous. They're fine. I don't care. But Kirk Cameron is so dumb.

That's the problem with the guy---not his religiosity, just that he's too big an idiot to realized how big an idiot he is. He challenged Stephen Hawking to a battle of wits. In fact, he expressed pity for Hawking.

"...to say anything negative about Stephen Hawking is like bullying a blind man," Cameron said. "He has an unfair disadvantage, and that gives him a free pass on some of his absurd ideas. Professor Hawking is heralded as ‘the genius of Britain,’ yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life.”

Just embarrassing, Kirk Cameron patronizing Stephen Hawking.

Cameron has been spouting that "nothing created everything" line for years and apparently thinks it's profound.


Sunday, March 22, 2015

Gregory Walcott, 87



He had a pretty good career going and a long list of credits in TV and movies when he agreed to appear in Plan 9 From Outer Space. He was a member of the church that was putting up the money for it and he did it for them. He was the best actor Ed Wood Jr ever worked with. He made monkeys out of Tom Keene and Lyle Talbot.

Gregory Walcott has died at age 87.

He was in some pretty good movies---Mr Roberts, Norma Rae, Prime Cut, Joe Kidd, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Eiger Sanction. Published a memoir,  Hollywood Adventures: The Gregory Walcott Story.

I don't know how he felt about getting so much recognition for his role in Plan 9. It didn't seem to hurt his career and he seems to have led a better life than most of us in any case. He was the one person involved in the movie who was clearly too good for it. (The late Joanna Lee became a successful television writer, but as an actress, she fit in as Tanna.)

He said he saw no hint of genius in Ed Wood which I'm sure is true. I'm not sure how much genius is required anyway, and I don't know if that makes Wood's life more tragic or less. Failure is failure, genius or not.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Nevada Smith

Watching Steve McQueen in Nevada Smith. A revenge movie. A western. Steve McQueen was way too old. He was 36. They keep calling him a kid. In the script, the character was 16. When his parents are horribly murdered, his mother skinned alive, Steve McQueen goes after the killers. He stops in his pursuit to get shooting lessons from Brian Kieth.

I don't know if stopping to be trained in gun fighting is an especially good use of his time. It may have been more interesting if he wasn't very good at it and was fighting people who were.

Like the Soviet World War Two movie, The Dawns are Quiet Here. A group of women operating an isolated anti-aircraft gun shoot down a Nazi transport plane. They see the pilot parachuting out. They grab their rifles and run out to capture him not realizing that the plane had just dropped twenty highly trained Nazi paratroopers. 

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Buddy Foster


So I was watching an old hillbilly exploitation movie called Sixteen, about a family in rural Georgia in the mid-'70s. The mother is Mercedes McCambridge (who dubbed the demon voice in The Exorcist). The older "teenage" son and daughter go skinny-dipping, a little odd for a brother and sister. Then the family takes the Trailways to the county fair where the two of them become separated. The girl is molested by a motorcycle daredevil and the boy runs off with an exotic dancer.

I liked the other kid in the movie---the little brother. He looked like a 1970s kid with long hair parted on one side. He gave an energetic performance as a teenage rural Southern degenerate. I didn't recognize him, so I googled his name. Turned out to be Jodie Foster's brother, Buddy Foster. He had played one of Ken Berry's kids on Mayberry RFD. I remember him from Adam 12 and Dragnet. He was the voice of a kid in The Point and you know the animated commercial where a kid asks Mr Owl how many licks to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? That was him. Played a Wolf Boy on The Six Million Dollar man.

He wrote a book called Foster Child, about his life as a child actor and about his sister, Jodie Foster. She publicly attacked him for it, accusing him of wanting "money and attention" (this coming from a millionaire movie star) and said that all he ever did was break their mother's heart.

Apparently his broken-hearted mother had comforted herself by spending all of Buddy's money. He had earned half a million dollars as a child actor (well over $2 million in today's money) but when he tried collect it as an adult, he discovered that his long-suffering mother had blown it all.