Claude Chabrol's Blood Relatives (1978)

The novel by Ed McBain was set in New York but Chabrol changed the setting to Montreal. Donald Sutherland as a police detective who investigates the murder of a 17-year-old girl which was witnessed by her cousin. The Canadian police were surprisingly polite even while interrogating Donald Pleasance playing a convicted child molester. It was kind of nice for a change. 

I'll try not to give anything away, but it seemed like a coincidence that I watched this movie soon after the Florida state legislature failed to pass a bill banning marriage between first cousins. 

The victim (Lisa Langois) is an orphan taken in by her aunt and uncle. She shares a bedroom with her cousin (Aude Landry) and there's a male cousin (Laurent Malet) living there, too. 

Ed McBain aka Evan Hunter really cranked out the best sellers. So many of them were made into movies. The best was Kurosawa's High and Low.

Available on a Roku Channel called Movie Vault which may not be around long. An identical channel called Movie Hub was quickly shut down.

Timothee Chalamet vs Orson Welles

I missed the Oscars. I hadn't seen any of the movies, but it's the only time anything interesting or surprising happens on live television. I didn't know it was happening that night until I looked on the computer and saw some news item about someone or other winning an Oscar for one thing or another. 

I watched some of it on YouTube. It looked painful, Timothee Chalamet smiling a bit too broadly as Conan O'Brien mocked his unkind comments about opera and ballet. Chalamet had to show he was a good sport, but it wasn't that funny. He should have practiced in front of a mirror, looking at images of himself when he was genuinely but only slightly amused and learned to simulate that. 

He should have played it cool in the months leading up to it. 

I am reminded of the words of Orson Welles talking with Henry Jaglom about Woody Allen. Welles hated Allen and thought he was arrogant. Jaglom argues that Allen wasn't arrogant, just shy. Weird that Welles would mistake one for the other, but he explained:

“He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anyone who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself but he loves himself. A very tense situation to people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest.” [emphasis added]

Orson Welles had the good sense to pretend to be modest. 

Instead of saying he wanted to be one of "the greats", Chalamet could have said he was trying to improve. Instead of saying he'd been doing "top level shit", he could have said "I've been trying my darndest."

Timothee's a millionaire. His career could grind to a halt and he'd still be fine. 

The Flying Deuces (1939) Laurel & Hardy

Laurel & Hardy are apparently on vacation in Paris. Ollie is terribly upset when a Parisian waitress rejects him for another man. He decides to tie himself to a large rock and throw himself into the Seine and he insists that Stan joins him in death. A French Army officer stops them and suggests they join the Foreign Legion---he'll forget his heartbreak in no time. They do and are soon sentenced to death by firing squad.

Laurel & Hardy made most of their movies for Hal Roach, but this was produced by RKO. The director and Stan Laurel reportedly hated each other and Laurel said the movie taught him to never work with writers who weren't familiar with their movies. I haven't seen their other feature films so I'm not familiar with their work, either. I found them a little annoying. 

Free on Tubi.

The End (1978) Burt Reynolds

I took a class in high school called "Death & Dying". I don't know what year it was, but VCR's were just beginning to take over and we were going to finish the class by watching a movie about death. I think the teacher wanted to get Woody Allen's Love & Death but it was out, so he got The End. We had to get permission slips signed to see an R rated movie. I was eighteen and got to sign my own.

Directed by and starring Burt Reynolds as a shady real estate dealer diagnosed with an incurable blood disease. He has three months to a year to live. His doctor (Norman Fell) tells him his death will be painful so he immediately sets out to kill himself. After seeing his elderly parents (Myrna Loy and Pat O'Brien) and raiding their medicine cabinet, he wakes up in a mental hospital where fellow patient Dom DeLuise, having already killed his father, agrees to help Reynolds end his life.

With Sally Field, Carl Reiner, Kristy McNichol, Joanne Woodward, Robby Benson, and Strother Martin among others. 

It picked up halfway through when Dom DeLuise appears. Much of the humor goes back and forth between Burt Reynolds' overwrought reaction to his diagnosis and people trying to cheer him up. 

When girlfriend Sally Field tells him that she feels that something she did caused his illness, he said, "You don't give someone a blood disease. That's a gift from God," which is pretty mild movie blasphemy. Might give you the feel for this. It's not a realistic dramedy. Becomes slightly serious when he talks to his daughter and imagines her reaction to his death but that doesn't last long.

Burt Reynolds drives a lovely Jaguar XKE (E Type) convertible. 

The teacher could have rented almost anything. Most movies are about death. We could have watched a war movie, a Bruce Lee movie, James Bond, especially On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The Third Man. Almost anything with a dog. I would say The Seventh Seal but it was in a classroom and you'd have to read subtitles from across the room.

Free on Tubi and Pluto. 

The Naked Jungle (1954)

Eleanor Parker travels into the jungles of South America in 1901, married by proxy to belligerent 30ish Charlston Heston. Wealthy but isolated, Heston is enraged to learn that his wife had been married before, a widow and not a virgin. This was important to him because, he makes it clear, he was an incel and had never known the touch of a woman. 

"I told you, I was 19 when I came out here," he says. "Before that, I had no time for women. Afterwards... in the jungle they have a name for the man who goes into the native villages at night. No one calls me by that name. You said I didn't know anything about women. You were right, madam. I know nothing about women. Nothing at all."

I'm a little surprised this was in a movie in 1954.  He's in no hurry to consummate their marriage.  

I might have been nine or ten when saw this on TV. My attention span being what it was, I couldn't have paid attention to the weird sex drama that drags on for a full hour. Only the last 30 minutes interested me with the millions of man-eating army ants devouring everything in their path. 

"You've both gone mad!" William Conrad says when the couple decides to stay and battle the ants. "You're up against a monster twenty miles long and two miles wide! Forty square miles of agonizing death! You can't stop it!"

The ant stuff was only half an hour and it still seemed slow. 

Technicolor. Most of it filmed in a studio, much of it in front of rear screen projections. 

They didn't treat the Indians well at all.

Free on Movie Hub and Prime video. $3.99 on Apple TV, and Fandango at Home. 

One Man Jury (1978)

Not much to say. Quite bad. Jack Palance as tough L.A. detective who botches every arrest by violating everyone's rights so his cases keep getting thrown out. He becomes so infuriated, he murders a guy. That took almost an hour. Then the Mafia murders a few people. They strangle a weirdly helpless boxer. 

It was an ugly time. Bad clothes, big stupid-looking cars. Palance drives a Ford Granada.

With Chris Mitchum, Robert Mitchum's son. 

Palance's fellow Ukrainian Mike Mazurki has one scene.

Movieland.tv seems to be back, but now it's called Movie Hub. No telling how long it will last. There were a couple glitches which made it clear the movie was from a VHS tape.

Someone else's "Melania" review

The guy on the right in the picture above is director Brett Ratner who fled to Israel after being accused of several sexual assaults during the #MeToo era. He hadn't worked in years before directing the "documentary" Melania.

Jeffrey St Clair on Counterpunch.com:

Here’s my review of “Melania”, written, like Norman Mailer’s infamous review of Waiting for Godot, without having seen it: Melania Trump is one of the world’s most boring people. There’s nothing the least interesting about her. She’s not even evil enough to waste time condemning. Her fleshy photo shoots lack the faintest hint of eroticism. Even the great Helmut Newton would have failed to coax any intimation of suggestiveness or carnality out of her stiff posture and bland, expressionless visage. Her entire adult life, she seems to have willingly played the role of a walking mannequin. Which made her the perfect match for Trump, of course, who views wives, like he views everything else, as acquisitions, objects for display. But is that the real her? Only her mani-pedicurist knows for sure. The lone memorable thing she’s ever done is wear that Zara jacket with the faux graffiti reading, “I Really Don’t Care, Do You?” when she was forced to a migrant children’s detention “camp” in Texas. Now, that was a little punk, a little spark of rebellion. But then she almost immediately reverted to her drone-like essence, which she has scrupulously maintained ever since.