The Million Dollar Duck (Disney, 1971)

Another sort of science fiction movie dealing with financial issues. Dean Jones as a struggling research professor. He exposes a duck in his lab to electricity and it starts laying eggs with yolks made of gold. The movie was made in 1971. It didn't become legal for Americans to own gold until 1974. Joe Flynn as a belligerent neighbor who works for the Treasury Department who causes trouble for them. 

They keep losing the duck and scrambling to get it back. It's worth a fortune but they let the kid run around with it.

This was the first of three movies Gene Siskel walked out on over the years.

With Tony Roberts a year before Play It Again, Sam. Lee Harcourt Montgomery's first movie, just one year before Ben. With James Gregory and Frank Cady.

Story by Ted Key, the cartoonist who did the newspaper gag panel Hazel.

Government officials force their way into the house looking for the duck. The kid rides off with it in the basket of his bicycle like a proto-E.T.

Dean Jones is nearly killed several times in the final chase. Lee Montgomery jumps off a moving truck and is nearly killed trying to cross a ladder used as a bridge between two high buildings while holding a duck. He would rather die a horrible death than lose his pet. 

Free on Movieland.Tv.

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

You know all those 1950's paranoid cold war science fiction movies about Communists from outer space? Well, this was about a capitalist from outer space, in this case getting patents on advanced alien technology and making a fortune.

It was different from They Live, the John Carpenter movie about parasitic alien capitalists. The Man Who Fell to Earth had a 1920's vision of capitalism, where the head of the corporation personally invents (or appears to in this case) his company's products, like self-developing photographic film which would have been pretty good in the days before digital photography.

David Bowie as the space alien. He did seem weird and alien. A costume designer said he was so thin that they dressed him in clothes from the boy's department. 

Buck Henry as the alien's lawyer. It wasn't obvious to me watching the movie, but I heard years ago, probably when Vitto Russo spoke at the university here, that his character was gay. It was 1974 and people involved in the production didn't understand it. WHY was he gay? The director explained that he just happened to be gay. It wasn't a big plot thing.

A surprising amount of sex and nudity, like a serious, arty version of one of those nudie science fiction movies. It has a professor (Rip Torn) who sleeps with his students. He drives a Rambler Rebel which was several years old at that point. It's always weirdly refreshing to see AMC's in old movies. 

It was prophetic in its way. The wealthy alien capitalist, like Bezos and Musk today, ends up building a private space craft.

Directed by Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don't Look Now).

Available on The Criterion Channel and free on Movieland.Tv, Freevee, and Hoopla among others. 

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)

Polanski's first feature after Knife in the Water. 

Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is a manicurist who lives with her sister in a large apartment in London. She has a young fellow pursuing her who she can't get rid of. You'd think he'd show some sensitivity to this since he becomes rather upset by a couple of gay guys showing an interest in him. Carol may have had a fear of sex, but we all have our phobias.

When her sister goes off to Italy for a few days with her wealthy boyfriend, Carol is left alone in the apartment. She misses work and suffers frightening hallucinations. Cracks appear in the walls, she hears footsteps in the hallway at night and worse.

There are a couple of sexual assaults. It's interesting to see London in 1965. The guy trying to get a date with Carol drives a Triumph TR4. Her sister's boyfriend has a Jaguar Mark II. Carol works in a large bustling beauty salon. If Polanski's English had been better, he might have seen a problem with an employee referring to the boss as a "bitch" in front of a customer, but maybe I'm the one who doesn't understand how Londoners talked back then.

The food looked terrible, especially the poor rabbit curled up on a platter.

Free on Amazon Prime, the Roku Channel, Plex and elsewhere.

Death and the Maiden (Roman Polanski, 1994)

Sigourney Weaver as a activist under the country's former dictatorship who had been tortured by the regime. Her husband (Stuart Wilson) gets a ride home with their neighbor (Ben Kingsley) and she realizes that he was the one who tortured her while she was blindfolded. She ties him up, tries to get a confession out of him so she can put him on trial in their living room over the objections of her lawyer husband.

It's a little like an episode of Law & Order. Whatever ambiguity there is in the episode, whether someone is guilty or innocent or whatever question there is about their motives, everything is made clear in the end.

It's interesting, at least to me, how many of Polanski's movies are set in single locations with a handful of characters. This is common in low budget movies. In this case the movie was based on a play. They don't say what country it's set in, but the playwright was Chilean.

Free on Amazon Prime, Tubi and the Roku Channel.

Trump

Four years will go by quickly enough. For some people it will. But, when Trump is gone, whoever comes next won't reverse anything he's done. Maybe the war in Ukraine will end which would save vast numbers of lives, and he's said the Zionists should wrap up their genocide in Gaza. Maybe NATO will fall apart. Europe has never been attacked, yet they've been in one war after another. Trump could actually be a net gain for humanity.

The Republican Party is now Fascist and they won't be going back. The Democrats have had this strategy for years to be as right-wing as possible. As long as they're ever so slightly better than the Republicans, liberals and leftists will have no choice but to vote for them, and if they're right-wing enough, Republicans will vote for them, too. If that worked, they would have won every election since Carter ran for reelection against Reagan. But every time the Democrats shift further to the right, Republicans do the same. And now we're a Fascist country.

On the morning of January 6th, 2021, I was walking out to my car to drive to work. For some reason, I was wondering how the U.S. would continue attacking elections in other countries. Every time a foreign election didn't go the way the U.S. wanted, it would claim election fraud. Wouldn't people notice that they sound exactly like Trump?

A couple hours later, my boss told us the capitol was being attacked by a mob of Republicans claiming the election was stolen from poor Trump.

Right now, the Biden regime is claiming that the election in the Republic of Georgia was fraudulent even though the results were perfectly in line with polls. 

I understand people who want to leave the country.

Last time Trump got elected, we were sitting around the dining table with my aunt and uncle. My brother-in-law asked how they felt when Trump won. I think he just wanted them to talk about their happy surprise when their guy won, but my aunt started talking about "brown people" moving into their suburb. I didn't know who she was talking about, but I googled it later and the place now has a large South Asian population which, Wikipedia said, was unnerving to the white elderly. If I'd known that, I would have urged her to try the Indian restaurants. It was before COVID so she could probably find a lunch buffet. She started talking about someone she knew who worked in a school in Japan, and the students there all looked Japanese. She wondered what would be wrong with America being racially uniform.

Freebie and the Bean (1974)

James Caan and Alan Arkin in the title roles. We never hear their real names. A couple of very violent San Francisco detectives who keep beating information out of people. An action-comedy that wasn't really funny. Their incessant banter wears thin and most of the "jokes" were just car accidents. Does show the danger car chases pose to innocent by-standers which you didn't really get watching Bullitt.

Detectives Freebie and Bean are after a wealthy hoodlum running a hijacking ring. They find themselves protecting him when they learn there's a contract out on him. 

I watched this on HBO when I was kid, and I for one liked the transvestite hitman (Christopher Morley who passed away this year). Kung Fu was still on the air but I had grown weary of David Carradine's fake martial arts. I liked how Morely effortlessly battered James Caan with karate in a women's restroom. It ends with Caan shooting him more times than necessary which was taken as a violently anti-trans thing, which it was, but that didn't occur to me when I was 13.

With Loretta Swit and Valerie Harper just as they got big on TV.

Free on Movieland.Tv. For $3.99 elsewhere.

Cronenberg's The Fly (1986)

Eccentric scientist Jeff Goldblum is prone to motion sickness. Hates vehicles. So he invents teleportation. But when he tests it on himself a fly gets in there with him. The machine doesn't know what to do, so it combines his DNA with that of the fly.

When I was a young fellow watching this in the theater, I thought it was a good thing he didn't have a tapeworm, but what about eyebrow mites?  

I had a friend who insisted we see the movie again and again, but he refused look at some of the gross special effects. He'd cower in his seat looking away and covering his eyes. Jeff Goldblum slowly turns into a giant fly and flies vomit on things they eat.

Cronenberg denied it, but people at the time thought it was an AIDS allegory.

And then there was the OLD movie, The Fly (1958). A guy invents a teleporter. He gets in, doesn't notice there's a fly with him, and when he comes out he's half-man, half-fly. I took a class in junior high school called "Monsters" where we studied horror fiction. It was before home video, so the class was going to rent a 16mm horror film to watch. We each had to pitch in 50 cents. The teacher read us our choices so we could vote on which one to rent. He read a brief description of The Fly, and because it had a teleporter, he sneered, "That sounds like Star Trek." I had never seen the movie, but I'd seen promos for it on local TV, so I knew it was nothing like Star Trek. In my outrage, I voted for The Fly, but thanks to the teacher's comment only one other kid did, too. He probably liked Star Trek.

Available for Halloween on The Criterion Channel. I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch it after seeing it so many times 38 years ago. I remembered it pretty well, but it was okay seeing it again. The special effects my friend couldn't bear to watch weren't that awful.