Buffalo Rider

I just saw one of my old high school teachers get run over by a buffalo. That's what became of his character in the movie Buffalo Rider. I was watching the Rifftrax version. The movie was worse than I expected. It got a PG rating, apparently for scenes of terrible things happening to animals and three or four homicides. At least the human deaths were simulated.

My teacher got third billing in the closing credits. As far as I know, he's retired, I would guess in his early 70's.

I mentioned this in another entry. He told the class I was in that he had been in a movie over the summer. But this was a huge class packed with sophomores. It was our first term of high school and we didn't know each other and we didn't know him. No one wanted to be first to enthuse over it. So we just sat there like lumps, not showing the slightest curiosity.

Some of my memories of him:

One time, I saw him walking down the hall alone. He briefly gestured as if he were talking to someone.

He started to say "Jupiter", realized he was talking about Greek, not Roman gods and changed to "Zeus", so it sounded like "Juice".

An idiot kid was mad at him because he apparently reported some of the kid's friends who were drinking beer in the parking lot before attempting to drive home. Sheeland told him he didn't need to justify anything to him and the kid shut up.

He directed a Shakespeare play. I thought it was fine, but I heard him tell another teacher he wouldn't try to put on a play in such a short time again.

One day, he talked about how he borrowed somebody's Harley Davidson. The engine died at a stoplight. He had to kick start it and it wasn't working, and I think he said the thing fell over and was so heavy he had trouble standing it up again, or maybe he just had to push it out of the street. I don't remember. It was forty years ago.

He revealed that teachers talk among themselves about student papers. That's how they discovered that two kids turned in identical papers in different classes. He read part of the two papers in class to show that they were hip to our shenanigans. The paper was very bad which is probably why they were sitting around the teacher's lounge laughing at it.

One time, he showed a picture of an elaborate tomb in Egypt but couldn't remember what it was. I tried to tell him that it was the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut, but it was the first time I ever tried to utter the word "Hatshepsut" and didn't say it right. I can say it effortlessly now.

I debated whether to put his name in this entry. What if he googled himself? Would it make him feel like a celebrity, or like someone was posting cruel memories of times he may have been slightly embarrassed at work?

Joy Reid, gay hater

Joy Reid tried to deny it. Now she's sort of admitted to writing all that anti-gay stuff on a blog in 2006.

The first I heard about it was from an article I read online in The Nation which pointed out that all her anti-gay stuff was pretty typical for a "liberal" blogger in 2006.

It was pretty recently that Democrats suddenly turned pro-gay. In the '80's, Jesse Jackson was the only pro-gay candidate for the presidential nomination and the Democrats were scrambling to get rid of him. More recently, Al Sharpton was the only one in favor of same sex marriage.

As governor, Michael Dukakis banned adoption by gay parents and sent state troopers to remove foster children from homes where foster parents failed to sign forms affirming their heterosexuality. His campaign was pleased whenever gay rights activists protested against him. He thought it would be his ticket to the White House.

Al Gore denounced gays. "It's not just another alternative lifestyle." He supported anti-gay bills by Jesse Helms and vowed he would never take campaign contributions from gay organizations.

You can watch video of Hillary Clinton smiling as an audience protested against her opposition to same-sex marriage.

Remember when Democrats suddenly turned pro-gay? It was the first time I really understood Black activists who thought that white liberals only supported the Civil Rights movement because it gave them something to be self-righteous about.

Many years ago, my family went out to eat. We went to a barbecue place downtown. I was somehow aware that it was the restaurant section of a gay bar. We sat there in a booth. My sister was infuriated that two women were sitting together on the same side of a booth. Gay bar or not, I had no idea what her problem was.

Years later, she knew she was supposed to hate Russia and I could see her struggling to think of a reason why. All she had was that Vladimir Putin was photographed without a shirt.

Later, she and the rest of the Democrats latched onto Gay Rights. The United States had briefly inched ahead of Russia in the area of Gay Rights and they decided to lord it over them.

Russia had repealed their laws against homosexuality ten years before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state sodomy laws, but that didn't matter. Remember the calls to boycott the Olympics in Russia? Homosexuality was a felony in half the states in the U.S. when the Olympics were held in Atlanta. If I remember correctly, Georgia repealed their sodomy law shortly before the Olympics.

Russia passed a law banning people from promoting abnormal sexual practices to children. It wasn't clear if this included homosexuality. Violating the law would get you a $40 fine. No one ever got a ticket for it. Russia is under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights which was going to rule on whether to overturn the law.

But, in the lapdog press in the U.S., pundits wondered what would happen if two male athletes kissed during the Sochi Olympics. What would the Russians do?

They had no idea that it was perfectly normal for two men to kiss in Russia. (See the Soviet movie The Diamond Arm.) In fact, two women athletes in Russia got excited over a victory publicly hugged and kissed. The Russians thought nothing of it, but the U.S. press declared that they must have been Lesbians trying to shock everyone.

Diamond Tongues, Canada, 2015

The story of a sadly struggling actress who becomes increasingly screwed up, making worse and worse decisions to the point that she tries to sabotage those doing better than her. She's cruelly exploited by an acting teacher. At his house, she comes out of the bathroom to find him sitting in the living room in his underwear. She's in the audience of a play she disrupts when it's going too well for the actors.

Trying to be an actor sounds awful. There's another movie called OK, Good about an actor trying to get work in commercials, and a documentary called Camp Hollywood about actors, mostly Canadians, trying to make it in Hollywood.

In Camp Hollywood, we see what actors will put up with for a credit to put on their resume. They work without pay for an obnoxious, possibly coked-up director. For actors who can't manage even to get unpaid gigs like this, there's a book Amazon keeps recommending to me which calls for actors to get a camcorder and make their own zero budget movies.

A book I did buy for someone else (and wrote about here) suggests that actors can earn a pretty good living outside of New York and Hollywood. There's work for them in every large city and there's a lot less competition.

Reading about Allison Mack's arrest for sex trafficking, it turns out that there's a thriving acting community in Vancouver, BC, with actors appearing in Hollywood productions filming in Canada.

Diamond Tongues stars Leah Goldstein. The character she plays comes across as kind of a pleasant airhead. She has blond hair with dark roots. Makes her sad descent into loathsomeness more interesting.

Available on Fandor.

Bill Cosby

Remember when Cosby sent his own daughter to prison? One of Cosby's victims became pregnant and their daughter, Autumn Jackson, was going to sell her story to the tabloids. But first she very kindly offered Cosby the opportunity to buy the story instead. So, of course, Cosby got her arrested for extortion.

At the time, Charles Grodin had a show in MSNBC and was mad at Cosby for his promos on Turner Classic Movies. Cosby said he liked only old gangster movies because the current ones had too much obscene language. I don't know why that bothered Grodin so much, but when the story broke about Cosby's illegitimate daughter, Grodin was outraged by the hypocrisy.

It was far, far worse than Charles Grodin ever imagined.

I didn't like the The Cosby Show or the wave of discipline-oriented family sit-coms it spawned. Finally culminated in the drama Seventh Heaven the star of which turned out to have sexually abused a few children over the decades. I found it embarrassing and perverse whenever people called Cosby "America's Dad". Is that what people want?

Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Long ago, I watched the bonus features on a DVD of Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (Иваново детство). They interviewed the guy who played Ivan, and he said that as a kid he was surprised he got the role because he didn't think he looked Russian. He thought he looked like an American kid.

So, if we take Nikolai Burlyayev's thoughts as a 12-years-old to heart, there is such a thing as being "Russian-looking" but some Russians look American,

Now, first I have to admit, I confused Eve Arden with June Lockhart. Lockhart played the mother on Lost in Space. This entry was supposed flow naturally from the last post about Lost In Space. But now it's just random.

In 1944, Eve Arden appeared in a movie called The Doughgirls playing Sgt. Natalia Moskoroff, the least Russian-looking Russian I've ever seen in a movie.

The movie was a comedy about some Army women staying at a hotel in Washington, DC. There's also a Soviet woman soldier there played by Arden. She was a sniper who had killed hundreds of Nazis, apparently based on Soviet Red Army sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko who was credited with killing 309 (it's believed the actual number was over 600.)

So Eve Arden makes a lot of bad jokes about how Russian women all kill Nazis. Her mother would kill a couple before breakfast each morning.

I'm not really going anywhere with this. So here's a video from a fairly recent Russian movie about Lyudmila Pavlichenko set to music by Woody Guthrie:

Lost in Space was too long

Our attention spans haven't been compromised by all this digital crap we have now. In fact, my attention span was compromised by too much 1950's TV.

"Oh, man. How long does this drag on?" I thought.

It was an old episode of Lost in Space. Did you know that thing was an hour long?

I had been watching a lot of half hour TV dramas from the '50's. Boston Blackie, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, The Twilight Zone. Trackdown, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

You can watch them in half an hour and get on with your life.

The Lost in Space episode didn't have enough plot for an entire hour. It was pretty obvious how it was going to end, and I always thought it was a children's show anyway, not serious science fiction, so I assumed it would cater to shorter attention spans.

I watched it to the bitter end. I was right of course. The Space Family Robinson was suspicious of the alien family that appeared on the planet a short distance from them. Then Will befriended the alien's kid but the two space families become suspicious of each other when the kids go missing.
 

Hulu doing Fyre Festival documentary series

I've never been interested in music. I have two brothers and a sister who are or used to be musicians, so I've been forced to attend scores of concerts and performances and forced to play music myself. I also don't like rich people, or at least I don't like IDEA of rich people. I might like them if I knew any.

So what do I care about the Fyre Festival? There's absolutely no way an event like this would ever have affected me in any way.

But I followed the story religiously. I couldn't identify with the victims---not the people who paid to attend the festival or the ones who lent millions of dollars to put it on, but I still wanted the monsters responsible prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

They did rip off local workers and businesses, too.

I just hope I'll be able to see the Hulu documentary series about it.

"A Bagful of Fleas", Czechoslavakia, 1962

Kind of a nice movie, 42 minutes long, about teenage girls living in a dormitory and working in a textile factory. We see them having fun, they dance together, take showers together, have a pillow fight in their pajamas. Boys throw rocks at their windows. One girl is having problems. She keeps walking away from her job, she was smoking in the dorm and she ate another girl's food package. There's a meeting to decide what to do.

There's this thing in American film commentary where anything produced in a Communist country has to be interpreted as secretly anti-Communist. I watched the movie on FilmStruck and the description refers to "rigid rules" and "authoritative officials" at the cotton mill, but they really seem pretty nice about things, especially for 1962. Those girls wouldn't have lasted a week at Wal-Mart.

It's not a documentary but there's no conventional plot either. It's seen through the eyes of a new girl. We hear her thoughts narrating the movie and other characters look into the camera as they address her.

Allison Mack arrested for sex trafficking

Here's a lesson to any young celebrities out there: Don't enslave people and don't be a sex trafficker.

Millionaire actress Allison Mack has been indicted for forced labor and human trafficking in connection to the horrible religious cult she's part of.

I don't want to go into it, so click here if you want to read about her monstrous alleged crimes.

TMZ reports that Mack was present when cult leader Kieth Raniere was arrested in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he fled last year.

Barbara Bush again

From counterpunch.org,  Jeffrey St Clair's "brief biography of her son George W., “High Plains Grifter,” published in Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror."

...His mother, Barbara, is a bitter and grouchy gorgon, who must have frightened her own offspring as they first focused their filmy eyes onto her stern visage. She is a Pierce, a descendent of Franklin, the famously incompetent president, patron of Nathaniel Hawthorne and avowed racist, who joined in a bizarre cabal to overthrow Abraham Lincoln. (For more on this long neglected episode in American history check out Charles Higham’s excellent book Murdering Mr. Lincoln.)

Understandably, George Sr. spent much of his time far away from Barbara Bush’s icy boudoir, indulging in a discreet fling or two while earning his stripes as a master of the empire, leaving juvenile George to cower under the unstinting commands of his cruel mother, who his younger brother Jeb dubbed “the Enforcer.” This woman’s veins pulse with glacial melt. According to Neil Bush, his mother was devoted to corporal punishment and would “slap around” the Bush children. She was known in the family as “the one who instills fear.” She still does…with a global reach.

How wicked is Barbara Bush? Well, she refused to attend her own mother’s funeral. And the day after her five-year old daughter Robin died of leukemia Barbara Bush was in a jolly enough mood to spend the afternoon on the golf course. Revealingly, Mrs. Bush kept Robin’s terminal illness a secret from young George, a stupid and cruel move which provided one of the early warps to his psyche.

Her loathsome demeanor hasn’t lightened much over the years. Refresh you memory with this quote on Good Morning America, dismissing the escalating body count of American soldiers in Iraq. “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many,” the Presidential Mother snapped. “It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

...

...Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, zeroes in on the crucial first five years of W’s existence, where three factors loom over all others: an early trauma, an absent father and an abusive mother. It is a recipe for the making of a dissociated megalomaniac. Add in a learning disability (dyslexia) and a brain bruised by booze and coke and you have a pretty vivid portrait of the Bush psyche.

With this stern upbringing, is it really surprising that Bush evidenced early signs of sadism? As a teenager he jammed firecrackers in the orifices of frogs and snickered as he blew them to bits. A few years later, as president of the DKE frathouse at Yale, Bush instituted a branding on the ass-crack as an initiation ritual. Young pledges were seared with a red-hot wire clothes hanger. One victim complained to the New Haven police, who raided the frathouse. The story was covered-up for several decades until it surfaced in Bush’s first run for governor of Texas. He laughed at the allegations, writing the torture off as little more than “a cigarette burn.”

All Fall Down (1962)

I always thought Brandon De Wilde was kind of weird-looking as a child but cute as a teenager. He was sixteen or seventeen when he starred in Blue Denim (1959), based on the play by James Leo Herlihy about a 14-year-old boy trying to get an illegal abortion for his girlfriend. In 1962, he starred in All Fall Down based on the novel also by James Leo Herlihy.

In All Fall Down, Warren Beatty plays Berry-Berry, Brandon's older brother. Berry-Berry left home and has been traveling the country. The movie begins with Brandon taking the Greyhound to Florida to bring his brother $200 he needed to start a business. It turns out he's in jail and needs money for bail.

Berry-Berry has been living mostly as a gigolo. Women see him and instantly fall for him. He sits in a restaurant when a rich woman sees him and hires him to work on her yacht. Later, he's working at a gas station and leaves with a customer who wants him to join her on vacation.

According to Wikipedia, the critic for the New York Times "found the premise of the movie—that 'everyone in the story is madly in love with a disgusting young man who is virtually a cretin'—fatally flawed."

I thought the movie was similar to Hud made a year later with Paul Newman. Both were about Brandon De Wilde's character idolizing an unworthy adult.

Directed by John Frankenheimer. Angela Lansbury plays the boys' mother, similar in a way to the role she played in Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate released the same year. With Karl Malden as the father and Eva Marie Saint as the daughter of a family friend who stays with them while visiting the city.

I read the novel about twenty years ago. It was great, but it annoyed me a little that every character had some eccentricity. The father was a socialist, the mother was Angela Lansbury, Clinton (De Wilde) likes eavesdropping and transcribing what he hears in shorthand and Eva Marie Saint's character named Echo is an unlikely mechanic who drives a luxury car from the 1920's.

Herlihy also wrote the novel Midnight Cowboy.

Available on FilmStruck.

Why are DVDs of zero-budget movies so expensive?

Nollywood.

I've seen companies online that say they're produce and package your DVD for surprisingly little money. One was $1.80 a copy for 100 copies.

I've never done it so I don't know what the issues are, but why are DVD's of zero budget movies so expensive? There aren't a lot of reviews of these things, there are no stars, in most cases you've never heard of any of the people involved. You're being asked to pay $30 for a movie sight unseen with the assumption that you're going to want to watch it again and again. They're usually dramas. If they were exploitation films, at least they could tell you objectively what you'd see. 

I wrote here long ago about a guy in England. He filmed an action movie using local hooligans as actors, then arranged to have DVDs of the movie sold in local shops for the equivalent of $5 each. It was cheap enough that people could buy them on impulse and it meant no one would bother to bootleg it. The movie was terrible, but the guy made a over twenty thousand dollars from it.

Nigeria has a thriving movie industry all off the sale of DVDs for a couple of dollars each.

There are probably good reasons the DVDs are so expensive. In most cases, you're not going to have the things in grocery stores. People don't buy them on impulse. Paying $5 for a movie you're not interested in is no bargain, so price may not have much affect on sales. A higher price might make people assume it's a better movie. Paying more might even make them like it better since they'd have to psychologically justify having blown thirty bucks on it.

There are writers making pretty good money selling their self-published novels on Kindle for less than a buck. You think guys with video cameras could pull off something similar?

Barbara Bush RIP

 This is a terrible time to be attacking Barbara Bush, but it's my last chance.

Since I have little to say, here's a 2010 article by the late Alexander Cockburn. I'm not even sure how much this qualifies as an attack:

Americans keep odd things up on the mantelpiece, or in the fridge: Dad's ashes in a biscuit tin or, in Barbara Bush's case, as her eldest son has just disclosed on national TV, the fetus she miscarried, put in a mason jar and then handed to the teenage George Jr., to take to the hospital. Imagine! "George, honey, could you hold this while I get the car keys?" "What is it, Mom?"

I interviewed Barbara Bush in 1979, when George Sr. was vainly challenging Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination. This was a time when her image handlers were trying to get round the fact that with her defiant white hair, she looked like her husband's mother. They sold her as "the Silver Fox" -- America's matriarch.

She was horrible. Bitterness seeped out of her like blood from an underdone rib-eye. Every banal question elicited a hiss of derision and contempt.

Years later, some time in the middle of George Jr.'s first term, maybe 2003, I was driving west across Texas and decided to swing north from Interstate 20 and visit Midland, where George Jr. was partly raised, as was the lovely Laura Welch.

My intention was to visit the crossroads where on Nov. 6, 1963, two days after her birthday -- yes, she's a Scorpio -- Laura rammed her Chevy into a Corvair driven by her friend, some say erstwhile boyfriend, Michael Douglas, who died in the collision. My theory was always that he'd stiffed her as her birthday date and when she saw Douglas' Corvair -- new model, novel in contour -- crossing her path on the Texan plain, treeless back then, she'd put the pedal to the metal. Chevys in those days were well built, and you know what Ralph Nader said about Corvairs -- "unsafe at any speed."

After paying homage, I went off down to the Midland public library where I thought Laura had once worked. A Texan friend of mine had murmured to me that in her single days, Laura "had cut a wide swath through Texas," and I thought I might pick up some gossip from the librarians. The library had two vast sections: "geology" -- filled with maps and data pertaining to that wondrous source of so many fortunes, the oil-rich Permian Basin. The other big section was "Genealogy," whither the new oil millionaires went to prove ancient lineage and, in the case of the women, to seek evidence that they were eligible to be a Daughter of the American Revolution.

"Didn't the First Lady work here?" I asked one of the old battle axes. (Actually, she hadn't. The libraries she served were in Houston and Austin.) There was a short silence, and then, in a contemptuous drawl, she called out to her colleague, "He asking about the Welch girl."

I found a small room devoted to press cuttings and memorabilia about the Bush clan. There was a color photo from the early 1950s that told all. It showed George Sr. and Barbara at the Midland airstrip, greeting Bush's father, U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush, and his wife, Dorothy. The senator was dressed in formal black suiting and homburg hat, his wife arrayed with matching formality. His son had a cheapo red slicker. Barbara, unsmiling, looked like someone in a photo by Walker Evans of the Okies fleeing west from the Dustbowl.

I remembered what one of the Bush cousins had told me, back in Massachusetts. "We always looked on George as the complete washout of the family. He went to Texas, he never found oil, he stuck Barbara in a trailer park and then gallivanted across the state." Her daughter Robin died of leukemia at the age of 4. George Sr. spent more and more time on the road, in Mexico and regions south. Her hair turned white.

This is the furious woman who handed the fetus to young George. If George Sr. hadn't been on the road, she would probably have thrown the jar at him.

George Jr., by the time he met Laura, was a complete mess, coked up, a heavy drinker. Laura lived at the other end of the Austin condo. Somehow, she detected promise and three months later, one day after her 31st birthday, they married. George was 31, too.

"What do you do?" Barbara asked Laura when George introduced them. "I read (and) I smoke," Laura famously replied. KO for the Welch girl!

I saw Barbara on the TV on Oct. 30 of this year, part of a full turn-out by the Bush clan at the Arlington stadium for the third game in World Series, the only one the Texas Rangers managed to win, as they went down to defeat by the San Francisco Giants. Barbara looked as bitter as ever, stabbing away at a crossword. Laura looked bored. George Jr. looked happy enough. What a family! 

Brendan Gill, the great New Yorker writer, told me he'd once spent the night in the Bush manse in Kennebunkport, Maine. Sleepless, he descended from his bedroom in search of reading matter. The only volume in the house he could lay hands on was "The Fart Book." A tacky family, except for the Welch girl.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com.

Parting Glances

Unable to watch Call Me By Your Name, I watched Parting Glances again. I had seen it in the 1980's when they showed it at the university. I was surprised how well I remembered it.
 
The first movie to deal with AIDS, made in 1984, released in '86, (Call Me By Your Name was set in '83.) About gay yuppies in New York.

Michael's boyfriend Robert works for a medical group and is going to work on assignment in Africa, Michael has been visiting and caring for his ex-boyfriend, Nick, who has AIDS. It dawns on Michael the real reason Robert is leaving.


The director, Bill Sherwood, died of AIDS in 1990. This was his only movie.

Made for $310 thousand dollars (about $750 thousand today), filmed in 16mm.

Available on Fandor.

Call Me By Your Name

I finally watched Brokeback Mountain a couple of years ago. Cowboy sexuality of any kind always repulsed me for some reason. Maybe from watching Gunsmoke as a child.

Now I haven't seen it, but I read about this movie Call Me By Your Name. I'm probably fine with a high school boy running around with a college boy, especially if they're both fictional. But I think I would just be annoyed by two fictional Jewish geniuses. Jews as intellectually superior is as noxious a stereotype as any.

They get more for their money in Europe and made the movie for $3.5 million, about the cost of an hour-long TV episode in the United States. It makes you wonder why Woody Allen movies cost so much.

In the novel, the two young fellows take a trip to Rome together. They couldn't afford to film this for the movie and they considered a number of alternatives. One was to have everyone else go to Rome while the two boys stay home alone for a few days.

They considered Shia LaBeouf, I assume for Armie Hammer's role. It sounds like they would have used him but the production company put their foot down because he was likely to foul it all up. A wise move looking at what he did to Peanut Butter Falcon. 

I'm surprised there aren't more low budget rip-offs of movies like this. All you need is two guys and a flock of sheep to make a Brokeback Mountain rip-off.

Ronan Farrow's not much of a journalist

Ronan Farrow.

He never uses one word when five will do.

Ronan Farrow told The Advocate that he was "part of the LGBT community".

He's not a Lesbian, but is he gay, bi-sexual, or transsexual? He used five words when one would have been clearer.

Apparently no one in the press knows what he was saying either. All the articles use the same phrase, "part of the LGBT community" without getting any more specific.

Fevers (France, 2014)

When thirteen-year-old Benjamin's mother goes to prison, he moves in with his Algerian father he 's never met who lives in the suburbs of Paris with his elderly parents.

A lovely boy even with his head shaved. But he's belligerent and foul-mouthed, and not in a cute way. An implausibly talented graffiti artist. A horrible, troubled kid with a father who's no help and a grandfather who's kind of a jerk. But they all have their own character arcs.

There used to be a cliche in American TV and film where the adopted kid gets spanked thus making him a true member of the family. This movie had a more violent version of that trope. 

I had mixed feelings about it. It may have been too cinematic to be realistic or to offer much insight. Pure cinema has its limits. It may have needed more talk.

Available on Fandor.

That song the children sang in The Birds

 You know the scene where Tippi Hedren is smoking a cigarette outside the school as more and more birds start landing on the jungle gym? And the children inside are singing that song. Man, I hate that song.

I assumed it was something they made up for the movie, but, no.  I googled it. The song was originally  about a man brutally beating his wife, but the kids sang a cleaned-up version:

‘Risseldy Rosseldy’ in The Birds

I married my wife in the month of June,
Risseldy rosseldy, now, now, now,
I brought her home by the light of the moon,
Risseldy rosseldy, heyjohnny dosselty,
Nickety nackety, rustical quality,
Willickey wallackey now, now, now.

She combed her hair but once a year,
Risseldy rosseldy, now, now, now,
With every stroke, she shed a tear,
Risseldy rosseldy, heyjohnny dosselty,
Rustical quality, risseldy rosseldy,
Now, now, now.

I brought her home by the light of the moon,
Risselty-rosselty, heyjohnny dosselty,
Nickety-nackety, rustical quality,
Willickey-wallackey now, now, now.

She combed her hair but once a year,
Risseldy rosseldy, now, now, now,
With every stroke, she shed a tear,
Risseldy rosseldy, heyjohnny dosselty,
Nickety nackety, rustical quality,
Willickey wallackey now, now, now.

She swept up the floor but once a year,
Risseldy rosseldy, now, now, now,
She said that brooms were much too dear,
Risseldy rosseldy, heyjohnny dosselty,
Nickety nackety, rustical quality,
Willickey wallackey now, now, now.

She churned the butter in her dad’s old boot,
Risseldy rosseldy, now, now, now,
And for a catch, she used her foot,
Risseldy rosseldy, heyjohnny dosselty,
Nickety nackety, rustical quality,
Willickey wallackey now, now, now.

The butter, it came out a grisly grey,
Risseldy-rosseldy, now, now, now,
The cheese took legs and ran away,
Risseldy rosseldy, heyjohnny dosselty,
Nickety nackety, rustical quality,
Willickey wallackey now, now, now.

She let the critter get away,
Risseldy rosseldy, heyjohnny dosselty,
Nickety nackety, rustical quality,
Willickey wallackey now, now, now.

I asked my wife to wash the floor,
Risseldy rosseldy, now, now, now,
She gave me my hat and she showed me the door,
Risseldy rosseldy, heyjohnny dosselty,
Nickety nackety, rustical quality,
Now, now, now.

I married my wife in the month of June,
Risseldy rosseldy, now, now, now,
I brought her home by the light of the moon,
Risseldy rosseldy, heyjohnny dosselty,
Nickety nackety, rustical quality,
Willickey wallackey now, now, now.

She combed her hair but once a year,
Risseldy rosseldy, heyjohnny dosselty,
Nickety nackety, rustical quality,
Willickey wallackey now, now, now,
Risseldy rosseldy, now, now, now.

A Decent Woman, Lukas Valenta Rinner, 2016

I guess nudism is still a thing. There was a nudist camp skit on the old Carol Burnett Show, there was the nudist camp sequence in A Shot in the Dark with Peter Sellers, and there were old cartoons and comic strips with nudist camp gags. But society has evolved. I don't know if the lack of nudist camp jokes means a lack of nudist camps. Nudists have always been rather conservative and it may be that public displays of hippie nudity rendered them irrelevant.

So I'm watching an Argentine movie about a maid who starts hanging around with wealthy nudists next to the exclusive gated neighborhood where she works.

I don't think there's a single person in this movie I'd want to see naked, but that's fine. I don't really understand nudism. Nudists say that you have to find ways of expressing your personality which you would normally do through choice of clothing. This is also how schools counter the claim that school uniforms deprive children of individuality. I don't know how this is a legitimate function of a public school.

I suppose that walking around naked puts the maid on equal footing with the bourgeoisie. She was better looking than they were.

Described as a deadpan satire. I wasn't sure what to make of it. The dialog is used more as a sound effect than to explain the plot. The ending is rather violent and a bit surreal. You'd think nudists would put on some pants before going into battle.

Available on Fandor.

Someone with a magic marker makes international news

Someone wrote "DOUCHE" on James Franco's star on the Hollywood "Walk of Fame". I'm amazed this doesn't happen all the time. It was reported on People.com and the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail explained:

Violet Paley had a consensual relationship with the actor, but claims that he once forced her into performing oral sex on her while they sat in his car.

The other four women were students at Studio 4, Franco's now-closed acting school, and claim the 39-year-old Oscar nominee asked women both on set and in class to perform topless or even completely nude.

One of those women, Sarah Tither-Kaplan, claims that she was shooting a nude orgy scene with Franco and several other actresses on one of the actor's film projects when he took off the protective piece of plastic covering their genitals while simulating oral sex.

...

Franco also painted himself as a martyr for the cause while appearing of Seth Meyers' NBC show, stating: 'There are stories that need to get out. There are people that need to be heard.

'I have my own side of this story, but I believe in, you know, these people that have been underrepresented getting their stories out enough that I will, you know, hold back things that I could say just because I believe in it that much.

'And if I have to take a knock because I'm not going to, you know, try and, you know, actively refute things, then I will, because I believe in it that much.'

Tither-Kaplan, 26, said that landing a role in Franco's upcoming film The Long Home was a huge break for her after working with the actor at Studio 4.

While at Studio 4 she had enrolled in Franco’s Sex Scenes master class, and in one short video that she filmed for the class she appeared topless.

That video was then uploaded to Vimeo without her knowledge she claims, and projecting an image she is not comfortable with while trying to move up in the industry.

And a still from the video ended up on at least one adult website according to Tither-Kaplan.

'Now, if you Google me, you can see me naked. Before I’ve ever been on TV or before I’ve ever had any real credits or before any of this - of course I regret that. I don’t want that,' said the young woman.

Despite this, she was happy to take a role on The Long Home, which Franco is both directing and starring in alongside an eclectic cast of actors including Ashton Kutcher, Courtney Love, Robin Lord Taylor, Annaleigh Tipton, Josh Hutcherson and Oscar-winner Timothy Hutton.

While on set, Tither-Kaplan was asked if she would be willing to appear in a nude orgy scene, which she admittedly agreed to do because she saw her appearance in the film as a big break in her career.

...

Her willingness to appear in the nude orgy shoot got Tither-Kaplan asked back to film another scene.

This time it was an unscripted bit that required her to be topless while wearing an animal skull and dancing around in a circle with other women.

One of the actresses declined to appear topless in the scene and was not asked back on set by Franco according to Tither-Kaplan.

'I got it in my head pretty quickly that, OK, you don’t say ‘no’ to this guy,' she said of Franco....

It doesn't mention that the women were paid only $100 a day for this, less than minimum wage.

Troll 2, Best Worst Film, etc

I was watching a little of Troll 2. I saw a documentary about it, Best Worst Movie made by Michael Stephenson who was the child star of the movie. It was a cruel tale of disappointment. 

First Stephenson himself----he starred in a feature film and had the right to imagine that might be the beginning of an acting career. Then Christmas came. He opened a present. It was a videocassette. The film had had a different working title and it took him a minute to realize what it was. He put the movie in the VCR and began watching as his dreams of success evaporated before his eyes. Children aren't the most discriminating viewers but even he saw the problems.

Stephenson apparently arranged for the cast to appear at a showing of the film which had developed a cult following over the years. The director, Claudio Fragasso, flew over from Italy. Nothing much had come of the movie after he made it so he was surprised and pleased when he heard it had taken off. No one told him.

At the screening, the audience laughed at some of the jokes early on. The director was happy. But then they kept laughing. They laughed at the serious scenes and the scary scenes. They wouldn't shut up. 

When the movie ended, they audience talked about it. One actor regaled the audience with how bad the director was---part way through the filming, the director forgot about him and didn't film the rest of his scenes. Fragasso said he didn't forgot about him---the guy's acting was so bad the director cut his part.

I'm of two minds. On the one hand, actors WANT to be in stuff. Shouldn't you be pleased to give them the opportunity to act even if they aren't being paid? Maybe your movie isn't that great, but you did your best. On the other hand, don't you owe it to them not to humiliate then with your terrible movie, not to play games with their hopes and dreams? 

Movie making with cheap equipment

A terribly hurtful video! A guy makes a movie with cheap movie equipment. He uses the same camcorder and the same digital audio recorder I have.

https://arclip.net/video/cVaCQd8noUQ/how-to-film-with-cheap-equipment.html

The resulting film is available here.

I was in favor of using only the built-in mic on the camera and using intertitles, narration or subtitles for scenes where the sound is unusable, but that's going too far.

I posted something on here long ago---it was a documentary from RT, the Russian news channel, about a guy in a Russian prison. He killed a guy in a drunken brawl. Prison sentences are much shorter in Russia and he was only in for a few years.

But the guy had worked in the film industry, so the prison gave him a point-and-shoot digital camera and a simple tripod and told him to make movies. He made a documentary about his horrible cellmate, a serial killer who thought the video would be his ticket out of prison. He made some fiction films. He had trouble recruiting other inmates as actors and they had to bring in a woman and child to play an inmate's wife and son on visiting day.

Kelley Baker, who calls himself  "The Angry Filmmaker", knew a guy who filmed a documentary on heroin addicts. He thought the subjects of the film would likely steal his equipment, so he used a couple of old VHS camcorders which turned out well. The format suited the subject matter. 

James Franco's victim still target of abuse from Franco fans

Remember the Scottish high school girl 35-year-old James Franco tried to molest a few years ago? He knew full well how old she was. When he was exposed as a sexual predator, Franco went on TV, grinning as he said that "social media is tricky". He explained that, even though he was a millionaire, a movie star and enrolled in several universities, he just couldn't figure out how to meet women and was left with little choice but to molest children on the internet.

Well, the girl is 21 now and The Daily Mail is reporting that she's still the target of abuse from trashy James Franco fans.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5594185/Student-James-Franco-flirted-Instagram-getting-online-abuse.html



James Franco fans are horrible, horrible people.

Tony Robbins must be a sex offender

Actual photo of Tony Robbins.

I came across this the same way I find out a lot of stuff. I read a tweet. J Elvis Weinstein said, "I would walk on hot coals to avoid a Tony Robbins seminar." I did a news search for Robbins.

Turns out Tony Robbins has attacked #MeToo, saying that women are just trying to feel "significant" and that he knows a man who now can't hire qualified women if they're good-looking. Even the people willing to spend a fortune to see him didn't respond well. Then he "proved" he was right by pushing a woman around in the audience. Here's the video:

Some time ago, Weinstein tweeted, "People who bring up your glass house all the time can't take criticism."

So what depravity is Tony "Lurch" Robbins covering up?

James Franco is a jerk to Tommy Wiseau

I read this review of The Disaster Artist by Isabel Braham: http://miscellanynews.org/2018/03/28/arts/a-disaster-behind-the-scenes-james-franco-disappoints/

It was interesting----focuses on James Franco cashing in on Tommy Wiseau's work then acting like a jerk towards him.

That said, “The Disaster Artist” really only capitalized off of the greatness of “The Room” and helped the movie reach a more mainstream audience. Personally, I found that “The Disaster Artist” as its own entity was hard to champion; much of my reasoning for this was due to what I found out about Franco after I saw the movie. In my brief moment of becoming a cult follower of “The Room,” I watched a lot of interviews with Wiseau and Franco. I was aware that Franco isn’t known to be the nicest person in Hollywood, but I was shocked to see him be a complete jerk to Wiseau in his interviews about the movie. He would cut Wiseau off mid-sentence and openly make fun of him. For someone who essentially hijacked and greatly profited off of another person’s creative ideas, Franco could have been more respectful to the person who inspired him.

She says she didn't find the accusations of sexual misconduct against Franco surprising, all things considered.

I didn't know Franco was such a jerk. He's a terrible writer and an artistic and academic fraud. He took enough credits to graduate from college in one term then enrolled in several graduate programs at once. If he's such a genius, why does he waste his super-intellect on creative writing and conceptual art? He's done nothing that required any brains.

He doesn't mind having gay fans. There's nothing unusual about that, but it seems to be Franco's one claim to being a decent person.

There's one comment on the article. I don't know if it was from a real person. It was just an extremely rude attack on the women who accused Franco of sexual harassment and it was from someone called "Special Needs Mom". The attack on the women didn't really make sense and it didn't make sense as a response to the article. You think there are bots out there defending James Franco?

Acting is dangerous even for children

Acting is dangerous work. My sister-in-law ended up in the hospital filming a scene running through the woods in a low budget horror movie. There was Ellen Burstyn who's had serious back problems for years after The Exorcist. There was a very brief shot less than a second long of her landing on the floor when Linda Blair knocks her down. That's what wrecked her life. Dick York was in pain from a back injury for years from using a hand car in a western.

Now I came across this on YouTube, an interview with Noah Hathaway who starred in Neverending Story when he was 12. I knew about this---that before filming began, they were teaching him horseback riding, deciding what horse he should ride in the movie, when the horse he was riding fell and landed on top of him. He had a broken back and spent a month and a half in the hospital. He started filming as soon as he was released.

But now the poor devil has had several back surgeries and still needs more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ5eCJxc2zI

I don't know how workman's comp would work in this case since it was thirty years ago and in Germany.

If you're filming a no-budget movie, by the way, you can get workman's comp on actors even if they're working for no pay. Probably not a bad idea.

I wasn't what you'd call talented 2

 
I don't know how old I was--fourth or fifth grade, but I had ideas for movies:

A dog with a black belt in Judo who works for the police. And I don't mean some anthropomorphized cartoon dog. Just a regular dog.

An intelligent squirrel monkey who works with the police to fight crime. He can't talk or do anything a regular squirrel monkey couldn't do. I don't know why a monkey would care about human crime.

I made a little book about cowboys. Nothing but pictures of them shooting each other. Sometimes, one of them says "Good" as the other one dies.

Made a gangster comic book. A hood borrows the boss's car. He murders a man while committing an armed robbery and uses the boss's car to get away. The boss is angry at him for using his car in a crime and murders him, then says "No witnesses" and murders a couple of his own henchmen who are standing there. From there, it was just random murders.

Did a comic book on old computer paper of mole men invading the surface of the Earth. Detailed their efforts at exterminating humanity. A teacher found this disturbing.

All this stuff is lost to time, but I couldn't draw worth crap even by child standards.

What was wrong with me?

I wasn't what you'd call talented

Thinking back to the fiction I wrote in the fourth grade, I remember two stories.

In one, a rocket goes into space. It contains two astronauts. The rocket is pulled by giant magnets to an unknown planet. People there put the astronauts in the back of a truck and drive them somewhere. People line the streets to see them. Then they're put back in the rocket ship and sent back to Earth.

A few years later, another rocket is launched. Magnets pull it away to the planet and the same thing happens.

The other story was about a haunted cabin.

A man stays in a cabin on a mountain top. He is chased away by a ghost.

Later, another man goes to the same cabin and he, too, is chased away by the ghost.

I think I had everything happen twice in case people weren't convinced by the first incident. It doesn't make sense in a work of fiction, but if you were reading it in the newspaper, you'd think, "That confirms it! It must be true!"

I was like Ed Wood, Jr, trying to convince people throughout the movie that Plan 9 From Outer Space was fact-based.

But maybe he had a point. Look at H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. It was set in the 1890's. Is it scary reading something set in the 1890's when it obviously didn't happen? I never read the book so I don't know.

Finn Wolfhard's hit single

Calpurnia

I have two brothers, a sister-in-law and a number of acquaintances who are professional musicians. I doubt any of them ever thought about it, but I imagine they would be grateful that their very first efforts didn't make it into mass distribution.

It's a shame that Finn Wolfhard and his bandmates can't develop their skills out of public view. They just put out their first single and it's reached No. 1 on Spotify’s Global Viral 50 playlist.

It would be like having your 9th grade schoolwork published as a collection of essays.

According to the band's press release, "We're super excited to announce that our debut single, 'City Boy' is out... We're super proud of it!"

I don't believe for a second they said they were "super excited" or "super proud". Wolfhard's adult fans relate to him like doting grandparents and some publicist was cynically tapping into that.

I listened to about half of the song and watched the video. It had a certain appeal. My guess is that the kids will be embarrassed by it in a couple of years. Several years after that, they'll think it was cute and kind of like it.

Bad alternative distribution and an alternative to that

I read this thing once.

A screenwriter went to some screenwriting group. One of the guys there said he was working on a script for a movie he was going to film in one of those haunted houses groups set up for Halloween. He said he had financing for it and he had a distribution deal.

The author of the article was stunned by this so he talked to the guy after the meeting. It turned out that the "financing" was that he was going to make actors pay to be in the movie and the "distribution deal" was that he was going to require each cast member to sell video cassettes of the movie.

It was pointed out that, at least in California, acting is considered a profession and making actors pay to be in a movie was considered bribery and was a crime.

Even if you could make a little money with a scheme like this, would it give you any satisfaction at all? It wouldn't get you any recognition or be a stepping stone to bigger things. I don't think you'd even be able to use your "success" to try the same scam again later.

In this age of digital video, you should be able to make a movie cheaply enough that you could give out DVD's in lieu of Christmas presents and the movie would pay for itself. Depending on how much you normally spend on gifts, the production could turn a profit the first year. But you could keep it going for years. Every time an organization needs a tax deductible contribution for their rummage sale, hand them a few DVDs. Bar mitzvah gifts, graduation presents---introduce your film to new generations.

Keep a list of individuals you've given them to so you don't foist more than one on them.

Movie dogs

Movies turned me off to pets at a young age. All they do is die. Old people and dogs always die by the end of the movie.

In adventure movies, I always knew that, realistically, there'd be no way the dog wouldn't get lost in the wilderness in the first ten minutes. The dog would be a millstone around your neck.

I was talking to a guy who said he cried at the end of Where the Red Fern Grows. I pointed out that those horrible dogs killed hundreds of raccoons which are probably higher on the evolutionary scale than a dog. Where were his tears for them?

I'm taking care of a couple of dogs now. Just for a week. And I realize now that the dead dog thing was probably wish fulfillment for the writers. Why would anyone want to be a slave to a dog? You can't go to bed early because you have to take them out. You can't sleep late because you have to take them out. You can't leave the house for more than a few hours at a time because you have to take them out.

Maybe it's just these rotten dogs I've been saddled with.

From THE ONION

GARDNER, MA—Realizing the movie was probably made years before any sort of mandatory industry oversight, nervous viewers watching a Turner Classic Movies airing of Home On The Range Sunday night told reporters that the classic western was old enough that the filmmakers might have actually hurt the dog that starred in the motion picture. “Jesus, did you see how close that dog came to the fire?” said visibly worried viewer Kelly Ashton, adding that there was simply no way the 1935 black-and-white adventure film would feature a reassuring “No animals were harmed in the making of this picture” disclaimer. “They definitely didn’t have the technology to fake something like that back then, and they must have done a bunch of takes before getting the right shot. Oh God, they probably had multiple dogs on set too, so if one got burned, they could just swap in another. Ugh, this is stressful to watch.” Ashton went on to say that while the dog at least appeared to stay out of danger throughout the rest of the movie, she was fairly certain that at least four of the horses had to be put down after filming.

https://www.theonion.com/report-this-movie-old-enough-that-they-might-have-actu-1819579477

That's from THE ONION.

So I'm not the only one who thinks about that.