Arnold Stang, Sherlock Holmes

Arnold Stang died last week at age 91. He played one of the gas station owners in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, was the voice of Top Cat, and played a heroin addict called Sparrow in the 1955 film, The Man With The Golden Arm. 

It's interesting to see comic actors in grimly serious roles. But I don't know if it always works. Margaret Mitchell wanted Groucho Marx to play Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind (I assume she was serious) and Benito Mussolini tried to his two favories American stars, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, to star in a production of Rigoletto.  

Sherlock Holmes 

And speaking of odd casting choices, Sherlock Holmes fans are upset over the choice of Robert Downey, Jr, in the title role. And the boxing. It turns out he claimed to be an amateur boxer in at least one book. 

They were showing a bunch of the old Sherlock Holmes movies on TV yesterday, and they weren't good. All filmed in a studio. They should have gotten out onto the street once in a while. 

The Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were set in what was then the present day, with Sherlock Holmes fighting Nazis. They were shot in a studio, so I don't know what stopped them from setting it in Victorian England.

James Cameron, Avatar, and the toll in human life

I keep feeling guilty about what I write. I attacked poor James Cameron, just because of the fawning profile of him on 60 Minutes. It made me think of Mike Wallace's fawning profile of Leona Helmsley. Leona was able to get him on her side by bringing up her dead son. Wallace's son had died years earlier. He should have interviewed Saddam Hussein blubbing over Uday and Qusay.

Helmsley's son was a crook. He stayed out of prison by having enough sense to steal only from his stepfather. And as it happens, Mike Wallace's surviving son is scumbag Chris Wallace on Fox News. Chris Wallace made a name for himself on some network news magazine with an attack on federal funds for special education. Wallace targeted Black parents in the South, ambushed them with cameras and claimed the fact that they couldn't or wouldn't instantly explain why their children needed special education was proof that they were defrauding Uncle Sam. Republicans in Congress used the report to cut funding. I don't know what Mike Wallace's dead son was like, but if he was anything like his brother, good riddance to him. 

But poor James Cameron---all he wants to do is entertain! Some people didn't like that he said that he was "king of the world" when he got his Oscar. He didn't mean it literally. He got poor Sigourney Weaver an Oscar for Aliens. And he deserves some credit for being Canadian, although he should do more for his people. 

I've never seen Titanic, but it reportedly had a scene of Leonardo DiCaprio standing at the front of a ship flapping his arms shouting that he is king of the world. This scene had tragic consequences. Cruise ship operators have had to stop passengers from trying the same thing. I don't know if there are proven cases of people falling overboard while trying this, but there are reports of it. 

James Cameron's success has come at a cost in human life. 

There was the 1993 movie, The Program, which showed football player proving their courage by lying on the double yellow line on a busy street. This stunt didn't work in real life. Two people were killed when they tried to do the same thing, and more were injured. 

People murder each other all the time, so it's hard to tell to what degree violent movies cause violent crime. But with The Program and Titanic, the cause and effect relationship is very clear. Nobody anywhere ever tested their courage by lying in the street before The Program, and nobody climbed onto the bow of a cruise ship yelling that they were king of the world before Titanic. 

I know, the people who did this behaved unwisely, but if you make a movie costing over a hundred million dollars, you obviously expect a vast number of people to see it. If a tiny fraction of one percent of your audience was dumb enough to give it a shot, that would still be thousands of people. And, if you're going to say that the people in real life who climb out on the prow of a ship are idiots whose deaths are their own fault, weren't the characters in the movie idiots, too? Should James Cameron be admired for making a movie about a couple of abject morons? 

What was the death toll was from Natural Born Killers? How about The Matrix? The Weekly World News reported that the movie The Deerhunter killed more people that the Hindenburg disaster. The number of Russian Roulette fatalities has no doubt risen since then.

Dial M For Murder in 3D?

Years ago The Weekly World News' columnist, Ed Anger, was thrilled with movie colorization. But he not only wanted all the old black & white movies colorized---he wanted them in 3D! I don't think you could make old, 2D movies into 3D back when that column was written. 

But you can now. Some company wants to use its software to make Star Wars and other sci fi movies into 3D. It doesn't interest me. But one thing I wouldn't mind seeing---and they could do this and get the serious high-brows on their side and avoid the unpleasantness that occurred years ago over colorization---is Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder in 3D as originally intended. 

The movie's not terribly impressive in 2D, a minor work by Hitchcock, but people have been saying for years that it was one of his greater works in 3D. There's no telling if that's true. I don't think it's been shown in 3D since it was released in 1954. But now there's hope that we can find out.

Precious: Worse than Birth of a Nation?

Here's a pretty good article by Ishmael Reed about the Lee Daniel's Precious, on the Counterpunch website:

http://www.counterpunch.com/reed12042009.html

The Color Purple, Siskel & Ebert, Mo' Better Blues, Spike Lee, Do The Right Thing

I remember years ago when The Color Purple came out. Siskel & Ebert reviewed it without mentioning the controversy about it. Then they came back a few weeks later to discuss it. And they both agreed, the movie was not racist. There may have been a time, they said, when there should have been a balanced view of Black characters in movies, but this was no longer needed. Even though The Color Purple was the only "Black movie" Hollywood had put out in years.

A few years later, this happened again. Siskel & Ebert reviewed Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues without mentioning the attacks on it by Nat Hentoff and others who claimed it was "anti-Semitic" because it had a couple of Jewish guys in it who were on screen for only about two minutes and were jerks.

And, again, a few weeks later, Siskel & Ebert came back to the movie to discuss the controversy. Again, they both agreed. But this time, they agreed that the movie was anti-Semitic for not providing a balanced picture of Jewish persons.

So. Jews are so underrepresented in Hollywood that they need to be carefully protected, but, according to them, anti-Black racism just isn't a problem anymore.

My guess is that Siskel & Ebert also had some idea that Black audiences watching a Spike Lee movie would be more impressionable, more easily influenced by a movie than Whites watching The Color Purple.

It was Nat Hentoff who started the anti-Semitism smear against Spike Lee. Hentoff claims to oppose censorship in any form. He defended racist college students who he claimed were being persecuted by universities. He defended an Israeli who screamed at a group of Black women, "Shut up, you black water buffalo. Go to the zoo." The Zionist explained that he was probably thinking of a Hebrew-language slur commonly directed against Palestinians. I doubt pro-Zionist Hentoff saw any problem with that.

There had been attacks on Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing---accusations that he had libeled Italian-Americans. These attacks came to an abrupt end when a mob of Italians murdered a Black 16-year-old who walked into their neighborhood to look at a used car.

Prop weapons

Gun nuts are everywhere. Even in countries where guns are illegal. Consequently, there's a large international market for adult-sized toy guns. Cheap plastic "airsoft" guns are a boon to the extreme low budget filmmaker. That and software to add muzzle flashes and shell casings popping out to your movie. And blood spatter.

Blanks are loud and dangerous. People have been killed by them.

One director told the story. He loaded a blank cartridge into a high powered rifle and handed it to the actor who immediately aimed it at him. The director dived for cover.

"Aw, I wanted to shoot you!" the actor said.

The poor actor had only worked with very low powered blanks on stage. The blank loaded into that rifle would have been deadly at that range. And if the director hadn't dived for cover, the actor would have pulled the trigger.

Today, the only danger we face is that of being humiliated by people spotting us acting out scenes with toy guns.

We live in a golden age! Almost.

I did watch A Fool There Was a while back, the 1915 silent movie, a story of lust and seduction. Theda Bara plays a "vamp" who takes revenge on a snooty bourgeois woman's sleight by taking her husband away from her. He gets weaker and weaker as Theda sucks the life out of him. The wife tries to get him back, but he's unable to pry himself away.

It looked so easy! Anybody could make a movie back then! If only film hadn't cost so much! And average income wasn't so low!

There's a career Roger Corman should have smothered in its cradle

James Cameron on 60 Minutes I wish Morley Safer would learn to contain himself. I'm sitting here with the TV on. Safer is gushing like a schoolgirl over James Cameron. But 60 Minutes has been going downhill for years. There was that Mike Wallace who thought he was really sticking up for the little guy by defending Israel against Palestinian refugees and their anti-Semitic pleas for Israelis to stop killing their children. Cameron has made a new movie costing $400,000,000.00. I don't know if this formula works for movies with absurdly large budgets, but they used to say a movie had to gross two and half times its cost just to break even. This thing could gross a billion dollars and still lose money.

Obnoxious insurance geezer

No offense to elderly persons who work in the insurance industry. Unless you're obnoxious.

A couple of years ago, an obnoxious ill-tempered geezer appeared on Community Access TV. I missed the beginning of it. It looked like he was speaking to a class locally.

He was an insurance company guy and he was gloating over his role in the movie industry, threatening to shut down productions that were falling behind schedule. He talked at length about Ben Stiller and the making of Zoolander. It fell behind schedule and this obnoxious geezer started hanging around threatening to shut it down. So Ben caught up and the obnoxious geezer went away. Then he fell behind production again and the geezer came back.

He mimicked Ben Stiller saying, "I can't work this way!" Accused him of "crying".

Maybe it was necessary for the guy to be a jerk when dealing with directors who were falling behind schedule, going over budget and threatening to cost the insurance company vast sums of money. But this geezer was also a jerk while publicly discussing it.

He seemed to take satisfaction with the fact that Stiller hadn't directed another movie since. In fact Stiller has directed several things since then including Tropic Thunder.

I wonder who the old guy was. Maybe he's dead now.

Ride the High Country

Okay, westerns weren't so bad Well, now I feel bad for what I said about westerns. I watched Ride The High Country the other day and it was pretty good. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. With Eugene, Oregon's, own Edgar Buchanan. There was no talk about someday living on a ranch, and didn't one guy have a semi-automatic rifle? Someone pointed out that the toilet was a little too modern, so it did have that anachronism.

Soviet westerns available on You Tube

At Home Among Strangers and The White Sun of the Desert

I never liked westerns. They were all about illiterates dressed in ugly clothes, in ugly buildings on an ugly landscape. Their only recreational activity was hanging around in bars and their greatest aspiration was to own a ranch. They had a lot of violence, which should have been appealing, but the fights generally consist of nothing but two men punching each other in the face. The gun fights weren't much better. Everyone had the same gun. Either a Colt revolver or a Winchester rifle. There was no variation. They could at least throw in a Derringer.

But I did kind of like the Osterns I've seen so far----Soviet movies inspired by American westerns, set in Soviet Asia in the 1920s.

In the Soviet film At Home Among Strangers, it was refreshing to see members of the Cheka as heroes. Made in 1974, in color with a few scenes in black & white.

There is a famine in the USSR. The government needs gold to import food. Cheka men transport the gold by train. When the train is robbed by bandits on horseback, a Cheka agent goes undercover to get the gold back.

They wear much more attractive clothes, they have a variety of weapons, although they go heavy on Nagant revolvers, and the architecture is more appealing.

And the whole thing is available on You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiAlFkw1EOU

And here is The White Sun of the Desert on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDEpRLPbSGM

Lisa Lampanelli, Lewis Black and Carrot Top

How did she know? Okay...I heard comedienne Lisa Lampanelli interviewed on the radio this morning. She's going to perform here in Eugene. She talked to the DJs on a local radio station. They mentioned other comedians who've performed here. She noted that people in Eugene sat quietly for Carrot Top, but yelled "You suck!" at Lewis Black. 

 Now, I wrote about that shameful event on the first entry on this blog. But how did Lisa Lampanelli know? I thought the guy would brag about it to the world, but I found nothing about it on the internet. It's nice that we were polite to Carrot Top.

Maybe Richard Heene wasn't so bad

In defense of Balloon Boy's father

And why shouldn't a man pretend that his son was carried away in a balloon? Think of the boon it would have been to his family if it had worked. He's a freelance construction worker who can't be doing well these days. He was out to get a TV reality series. This was his chance.

It's a case of "moral luck", where our judgment of a person's actions is based on things beyond his control.

Think of what our judgment of Heene would be if two of the helicopters chasing the balloon had collided. Then crashed into a hospital.

On the other hand, if he had succeeded, gotten his TV show, become a beloved celebrity, provided his family with a lifetime of financial stability, and only then, years later, revealed that it all started with his Balloon Boy hoax....

Look at William Friedkin. He filmed the chase scene in The French Connection by speeding through a busy street with a small light on the roof of the car.

As the New York Times reported in an article about the releasing of a new DVD of the movie:

“We took off, with Billy telling Bill Hickman, ‘Give it to me, come on, you can do it, show me!’ ” Mr. Jurgensen said in an interview. “We had a police siren on top that people could hear, so that those who were able to get out of the way, could.”

There were no permits and no planning — just sheer nerve. “After 26 blocks, from Bay 50th to Bay 24th Street, I ran out of film, but I knew I had enough,” Mr. Friedkin said. “The fact that we never hurt anybody in the chase run, the way it was poised for disaster, this was a gift from the Movie God. Everything happened on the fly. We would never do this again. Nor should it ever be attempted in that way again.”

At that point in his career, Friedkin had directed a couple of documentaries and an episode of Sonny and Cher. How would we judge this scumbag if he had killed somebody?

Friedkin went on to direct The Exorcist which left a 12-year-old girl with a broken back and lifelong medical problems. Ellen Burstyn was also injured. There's a very brief shot in the movie where we see her falling on a hard wood floor. That shot cost her back problems ever since.

Thomas Nagel's 1979 article on "Moral Luck"

In 1979, Thomas Nagel wrote an article entitled "Moral Luck". It written as a response to Bernard William's paper on the same subject. They are a response to the Kantian view that morality is immune from luck.

But Nagel argued there are four kinds of luck that affect moral judgment:

Resultant luck, which I just talked about.

Circumstantial luck, which, I think, Frank Rich seemed to be talking about in his recent column defending Balloon Boy's dad. Heene just happened to live in a time when there are news helicopters and news networks that want to cover this type of thing, an age of reality TV shows, an age when, other than winning the lottery, a reality TV show is a construction worker with a high school diploma's only hope of escape.

Constitutive luck, where genetic or personality traits you have no control over affect your conduct. Balloon Boy's father was a narcissist with an intense interest in what he called "science".

And Balloon Boy's mother was Japanese. I don't know how much that means, but Balloon Boy's father thought it was why she went along with all his nonsense. That and the fact that she had a domineering father.

Causal luck, which I guess is just the sequence of events. The Wife Swap appearance, plus the negotiations for the reality show. I don't know.

In conclusion

I think we can all agree that Richard Heene was a completely innocent victim.

Well, maybe not. But, for God's sake, would-be filmmakers ought to show some of his spunk!

When Victor Mature came to Hollywood, he slept in a pup tent and lived on candy bars. He didn't have to---he could have stayed with friends. But he stayed in the pup tent and got publicity and a movie career out of it.

Here's an exercise:

Think of five harebrained schemes that could be your ticket to quick success!

Dragnet

All you had to do was read your cue cards as fast as you can.

When you watch old episodes of Dragnet and see those actors standing there reading their teleprompters as fast as they can, you feel like maybe YOU could be an actor, too!

The show went from radio to television in the 1950s. Unlike most shows that made this switch, it kept the same cast.

On the radio, actors don't memorize lines. They stand in front of the microphone reading their script. Webb preferred this, so when the show went to television, pretty much all the dialog was on cue cards and teleprompters. Actors rarely had to remember lines.

If you watch the show, at least the color episodes, you can see that all the dialog scenes are shot in a studio. There is an establishing shot with a voice over narration, then the dialog is done in a studio in front of a rear screen projection. It worked pretty well most of the time. Could be done fairly easily now in front of a green screen.

It seems like it would be a good approach. You could get better performances both from stage actors who tend to over do it, and non-actors who usually talk very, very slow.

"Some people call me 'One Shot'..."

McMillan & Wife director Alex March speaks through a character 

I watched an episode of McMillan & Wife last night. I heard that Rock Hudson thought Susan Saint James was a hippie. 

In one scene, McMillan and the sergeant talk to a crime lab technician played by John Fielder. The technician had a large print of a picture taken with a hidden camera. They asked why he only made one print from all the pictures they took. "I chose the best shot. It saves time. It saves money. Some people call me 'One Shot Simpson'." 

I think he was giving voice to the director's philosophy.

B movies vs. television

I watched a couple of Edgar Ulmer movies. One was one of his better works, The Man From Planet X, the other was his directoral debut, Damaged Lives made in 1933, an exploitation film about venereal disease in the days before antibiotics.

Neither was very good. I'm a little disappointed after hearing the French gushing over Ulmer.

I still say TV shows are the new B movies. It made sense for the French New Wave to look to B movies of the '30s and '40s, but for independent filmmakers today, it's TV of the '60s and '70s.

I was watching an episode of Charlies Angels. One of the Angels goes undercover in a women's prison. The scene where she's brought into prison for the first time seemed to have been filmed in the waiting room of a dentist's office. A scene in the prison yard was filmed at a public swimming pool----swimming pools have fences with barbed wire, so it looks sort of like a prison. Except for the swimming pool.

The show stunk. But such economy!

Edgar Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen

The French consider him a genius

I was watching the documentary, Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen, about the B movie director. Some in the French New Wave--Luc Moullet for one--considered him an auteur.

The story was that Ulmer directed an excellent B list movie for Universal studios, a movie called The Black Cat. It should have been his ticket to keep working for the major studios, but he was sleeping with the wife of the nephew of the president of the studio and he was blackballed.

Ulmer went to work for PRC, Producers Releasing Corporation, the most impoverished of the Poverty Row studios. Ulmer claimed that they shot all their movies there in 6 days and that he was given just enough filmstock to shoot on a 2:1 ratio. He was best known for directing the noir film Detour.

The documentary seemed to see Ulmer as a sad case because he didn't get to direct big budget movies and was stuck on Poverty Row. But it's patronizing to feel sorry for someone in his position. Directing 60 low budget movies wasn't good enough? The world isn't full of would-be filmmakers who wouldn't love to live his life?

They interviewed Ulmer's daughter, Arianne, plus Peter Bogdanovich, Roger Corman, Wim Wenders, and Joe Dante.

Dante shared some advice Roger Corman gave him. When making your shooting schedule, figure out how much time you need to make the movie really great. Then figure out how long to make it okay. Then how long just to get it on film. And go with the third one.

Here's my advice: Imagine your movie the way it would look if you had unlimited time and money. Then imagine an extended skit on The Carol Burnett Show or Saturday Night Live, or Mad TV, based on your movie. Then make a movie that looks like the skit.

One of Ulmer's movies, The Island of Forgotten Sins

There was also one of Ulmer's B movies on the DVD, something called The Island of Forgotten Sins.

It wasn't very good.

Throughout the documentary, they told us that directors today could learn a thing or two from Ulmer----they should look at his work before complaining about low budgets and tight schedules. But The Island of Forgotten Sins wasn't much of an inspiration.

It's understandable that the French New Wave looked to American B movies for inspiration. They had a morbid fascination with Hollywood. They wanted to direct movies themselves, and they knew if they were ever going to do so, it would be on very small budgets. But does it make sense for independent filmmakers today to look to these terrible movies from the '30s and '40s?

Instead of B movies, look to American TV shows. Not the new ones---they cost too much. Look at old episodes of Bonanza, The Rifleman, Quincy, McMillan and Wife. T.J. Hooker. Charley's Angels.

Many of these shows were made using B movie techniques, and shows in the '50s and '60s were often directed by former B directors. Joseph Lewis directed episodes The Rifleman. William Beaudine directed episodes of Lassie and Spin & Marty on the old Mickey Mouse Club. Ida Lupino directed episodes of Gilligan's Island.

They worked on extremely tight schedules and low budgets. And they were pretty good shows. Think of what you could do using the same form but different content.

Chuck Norris vs. Jacques Tati

Tati wins, obviously It was the 1980s. Things were different in those days. Some friends and I rented the movie Delta Force, starring Chuck Norris, with Joey Bishop and...some other people. I don't remember. Was Lee Marvin in it? I don't know what possessed us to rent the stinking thing. At least we didn't see it in a theater. 

But that was the '80s. In those days, in every commercial movie, the camera moved constantly and for no reason. Every shot was a tracking shot.

Delta Force's Zionist director Menahem Golan pioneered a money-saving technique I hadn't seen before or since. He would just roll the camera back and forth on a short length of track in each scene. The camera was constantly moving but he only needed to lay half as much track.

When you read anything about independent filmmaking in those days, they were always talking about improvised dollies, tracks, cranes. Wheelchairs were the big thing, of course. It was refreshing to see a Jacques Tati movie, shot entirely in static camera long shot. Look for Mr Hulot's Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Trafic. And Playtime is interesting, with English dialog by Art Buchwald. 

Poor Balloon Boy

Well. Dr Drew Pinsky discovered---or confirmed what many assumed---that celebrities are hopeless narcissists. And the most narcissistic of the narcissists, he found, were on reality TV.

Directing doesn't have to be difficult

Young Ron Howard's adventure with Lassie

Maybe directing isn't so hard after all.

When Ron Howard was 15 or 16, he appeared in a three-part episode of Lassie. He talked about it on an episode of David Letterman.

It was 1970. It turns out that they didn't shoot re-takes on Lassie. They would set the camera up, film the scene in one shot; the director would yell "Cut!" and they'd rush to the next scene.

I saw the episode. It was on The Animal Channel in the middle of the night. I slept through most of it. But that's how it was done---like a Jim Jarmusch movie. Like Stranger Than Paradise. One scene, one shot. In this case filmed in one take.

But poor Ronny (as he was then known) Howard. He had a close-up at the end of the episode. He was supposed to cry, but he couldn't work up the tears. He knew he didn't pull it off, but the director yelled "Cut!" and, to Ronny's horror, moved on to the next shot---a close-up of Lassie with Ronny's hand resting on her shoulder.

Ronny thought he could salvage his dignity with some hand acting. He tried to express the depth of his emotion through his hand on Lassie's mane.

The director yelled "Cut!" He stormed over and shouted, "DON'T YOU EVER FUCK WITH LASSIE'S CLOSE-UP!"

You can't accuse the director of not caring about his art.

They did a re-take of Lassie's close-up. The only re-take in the entire three-part episode.

But that seems pretty easy. Set the camera up. Turn it on for three minutes. Turn it off. Go to the next scene.

Heckler: A documentary by Jamie Kennedy. About hecklers.

Comedians are more sensitive that you might imagine

I went to see Lewis Black when he performed in Eugene, Oregon. There was a huge crowd.

There was an opening act--another comedian. I don't remember his name, but his main job seemed to be to draw out the hecklers and smack them down so Lewis Black wouldn't have to do it himself.

These were nice hecklers. They weren't shouting abuse. They were greeting him----they were just so happy to be there. He said it was nice to be in Eugene, and they yelled "GO DUCKS!" Then someone explained why they shouted "Go Ducks".

He did smack them down. Their jokes were bad. Their name wasn't on the marquis. People didn't come to hear them. He climbed down and sat in the audience and yelled something to show that heckling was bad.

Okay.

Lewis Black came out. He was on stage for about 30 seconds when someone in back yelled as loud as he could, "YOU SUCK, BLACK! YOU'RE A DEGENERATE!"

I didn't make out what else he said. It was political, I'm sure.

Lewis Black waited with a look of disgust on his face. Security hustled the idiot out.

So. Someone paid at least $24 to get in, just to yell briefly at Lewis Black and get thrown out. Maybe he thought they'd let him stay. Like it was a town hall. I assumed he was proud of himself and brag about it on the internet. But I searched Google and found nothing.

But I did stumble upon something else. The movie Heckler, a documentary by someone called Jamie Kennedy. I got it from Netflix.

It started out with hecklers in comedy clubs. Some trying to be funny. Some trying to be mean. How comedians cut them down and shut them up.

"You're bald!" a woman shouted at a bald comedian.

"You have a bull dyke hair cut. I didn't say anything about that."

The documentary quickly moved on to talk about movie critics, especially those on the internet. Lewis Black referred to them as "Mr Fatty Fuck sitting in his basement".

Some critics did, indeed, say terribly unkind things about Jamie Kennedy.

Kennedy interviewed a few of them. He seemed hurt and sullen. Sulked his way through the interviews. The critics seemed to enjoy the attention.

One critic didn't understand what the problem was. His review had called for Kennedy to be "stopped". Another was completely obnoxious.

Now, here's the thing. I never heard of Jamie Kennedy. Watching this movie, I got the idea that he was a struggling comedian. That he was doing okay at stand-up and had managed to get some movie roles, but he was struggling against all odds. I imagined him and his friends setting out with little more than a camcorder to make this documentary.

He would ask the critics, "Don't you want me to improve?" He sounded like he was a beginner who needed advice from hecklers.

Then I look at imdb.com. Kennedy has a long list of producer and acting credits.

Comedians always talk very tough. They're foul-mouthed and verbally aggressive. But Carrot Top is the only one with the muscle to back it up.

The real shocker from this documentary is that wealthy celebrities actually read blogs.

In defense of hecklers, sort of

Look at Borat. Sacha Baron Cohen. Or Baron Sacha Cohen. Whatever his name is.

Much was made of a scene in Borat where he gets on stage in some place and sings an anti-Semitic song he claims comes from Kazakhstan. Something about throwing Jews down a well. Cohen claimed he had thus exposed the audience's shocking anti-Semitism.

Now, Cohen had gone into this place with a camera crew. In the unlikely event that anyone there was actually fooled by him, they made everyone sign a release form which spelled out the fact that he wasn't who he said he was. They knew they were in a movie, they knew it was a joke, and when he started in with the Jewish stuff, it was obvious that Cohen was himself Jewish. So they were polite and played along. And to thank them, Cohen smeared them all as anti-Semites because they didn't shout him down.

And in defense of the critics

Now it turns out that not even Jamie Kennedy could stand Son of the Mask. That's the movie critics attacked him for. He admitted it was no good. It won the Golden Raspberry Award for worst sequel or remake. It cost $84 million and grossed $17 million domestically. By all accounts, it was a terrible movie and, by all accounts, Jamie Kennedy did a lousy job starring in it.

Okay, the movie was on TV, I saw part of it. Jamie Kennedy was horrible! Absolutely terrible! He SHOULD be stopped! He was absolutely the worst actor I've ever seen. Ever. No one could possibly see this movie and conclude that Jamie Kennedy is anything but the worst actor in the world. Bad beyond the bounds of credibility.