Roseanne

You know who I feel sorry for? The children. Jayden Rey and Ames McNamara who had their very first sit-com cancelled because Roseanne Barr is a racist.

And I guess there's the crew and writers on the show who now find themselves unemployed.

Of course Roseanne's a racist. She's a Zionist. She's a racist by definition. She attended a conference in Jerusalem to combat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Counterpunch.com reported:

One of the most alarming of the statements was made by Israeli Minister of Transportation, Israel Katz, who called for the “focused civilian elimination of the leadership of BDS."

We need to know how “to act against them, how to isolate them, also to transfer information to intelligence agents around the world, and other agents. We have to understand that there is a battle here. It is wrapped in many covers,” Katz said.

Barr on the other hand, called for nuclear bombing the University of California-Davis following its students’ support of BDS.

Jeffrey St. Clair tweeted:

I was on Roseanne's radio show a few times and the experience was usually pretty much like this, fairly rational banter for about 10 minutes where she would then erupt into an unhinged anti-Muslim rant...

St. Clair also wrote this on counterpunch.org:

Roseanne was riding high on the ratings for her new Trump-friendly show, then photos emerged from a spread in Heeb magazine of her dressed as Hitler putting a tray of human-shaped cookies into an oven. Is this more or less offensive than Kathy Griffin’s guillotine routine? And the last time I was on her radio show she called me an Anti-Semite for criticizing Israel’s use of white phosphorous in Gaza…

The guy who accused George Takei retracts his story

Scott Brunton, who last year accused George Takei of sexually assaulting him in 1981, has retracted several significant points in his accusation.

He now says there was no inappropriate touching, that two toxicologists ruled out any spiked drinks, a "coffee meeting" with Takei never happened and he "let slip that, in his effort to be listened to, he’d fabricated some things. This and other evidence would indicate a hard-to-swallow conclusion: We — both public and press — got the George Takei assault story wrong.”

http://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/george-takei-accuser-changes-story-sexual-assault-1201968568/

Another Nollywood movie

It wasn't that good.

Appeared to be filmed in standard definition----at least, it was in the 4:5 aspect ratio. The picture quality was fine. A dialog movie. There were scenes with actors sitting outside in chairs talking which didn't work very well.

I wasn't able to follow the plot. A religious tale. There's a ghost in the house that it turns out is the cause of a series of misfortunes and medical problems. A well-dressed man in black appears, talks to the men for a couple of minutes then vanishes into thin air and the men aren't surprised or disturbed by this. One of them sits down in the spot on the sofa where the ghost had been. One man wants to marry a girl he just met but he wants permission from the woman he was already romantically involved with.

There were interior scenes in a couple of different houses, a primitive waiting room for a doctor's office and a simple set for a hospital room. There was an establishing shot of a church then a scene in an office inside. The minister has a sudden revelation that a ghost is causing all their problems.

The ghost storyline might have been pretty good but they only mention it in those two scenes.

There were no scenes filmed in public spaces where they'd need permission---no scenes of characters chatting as they walk through a grocery store or wait in line at the DMV. If you could film without paying the cast or crew, you could make this movie pretty much for free. There weren't really any props. You might have to rent a couple of Airbnb's.

It was only 47 minutes but appeared to be part of a two or three-part series.

There's no sex or violence.

They pad the running time by having very long credits, two and half minutes in this case, because they show one name on the screen at a time. It would be okay---like the opening credits of a Woody Allen movie---except the music was terrible.

Ronan Farrow poo-poos child abuse

Mom likes him best.

Ronan Farrow dismissed Moses Farrow's essay about the abuse he and the other adopted children in his family suffered at the hands of Mia Farrow.

“Not worth saying much to dignify the repeated campaign to discredit my sister, often by attacking our mother. This happens every time Dylan speaks, so this is all I’ll offer: My mother did an extraordinary job raising us, and none of my siblings with whom I’ve spoken ever witnessed anything but love and care from a single mom who went through hell to keep her kids safe."

When Ronan Farrow says "none of my siblings with whom I've spoken ever witnessed anything..." what is he saying? Are there any siblings he hasn't spoken to? Did he question them, asking if they ever saw Mom abuse any of them?

Mia Farrow adopted eleven children. Of the eleven, three are/were completely estranged from her and two committed suicide. About half. She admitted in court that she physically attacked Soon-yi. Soon-yi didn't fight back. It was testified in court that she slapped Moses in the face because he couldn't find a dog leash. Why would anyone do that?

Ronan was four when Mia Farrow drilled it in Dylan that Woody Allen molested her. Even Dylan refers to it as an "alleged attack". Ronan doesn't know anything about it. The accusation was investigated in Connecticut and New York. Investigators said that the incident did not happen. If Ronan knows something they didn't, he hasn't said what it is.

After the #MeToo movement, simply dismissing an accusation of abuse doesn't work.

Mia, Ronan and Dylan attack Moses: a racial element?

Child rapist Roman Polanski with violent, abusive
adoptive "mothers" Mia Farrow and Joan Crawford.

After all the #MeToo stuff, it's odd to see Ronan Farrow switching sides and attacking Moses Farrow for writing about the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of their mother, Mia Farrow.

And I find it strange that out of this large multi-racial "family", it's Mia Farrow and her two favored white children, Ronan and Dylan, who are attacking Moses. Dylan, who modestly claims to speak for all victims, said before that Moses' claims were "irrelevant" and "my brother is dead to me."

Three of the four Asian kids Mia Farrow adopted with Andre Previn became estranged from her. Two children who were adopted later, Tam who was Vietnamese and Thaddeus who was from India, committed suicide.

From Moses' essay:

It was important to my mother to project to the world a picture of a happy blended household of both biological and adopted children, but this was far from the truth. I’m sure my mother had good intentions in adopting children with disabilities from the direst of circumstances, but the reality inside our walls was very different. It pains me to recall instances in which I witnessed siblings, some blind or physically disabled, dragged down a flight of stairs to be thrown into a bedroom or a closet, then having the door locked from the outside. She even shut my brother Thaddeus, paraplegic from polio, in an outdoor shed overnight as punishment for a minor transgression.

Soon-Yi was her most frequent scapegoat. My sister had an independent streak and, of all of us, was the least intimidated by Mia. When pushed, she would call our mother out on her behavior and ugly arguments would ensue. When Soon-Yi was young, Mia once threw a large porcelain centerpiece at her head. Luckily it missed, but the shattered pieces hit her legs. Years later, Mia beat her with a telephone receiver. Soon-Yi’s made it clear that her desire was simply to be left alone, which increasingly became the case. Even if her relationship with Woody was unconventional, it allowed her to escape. Others weren’t so lucky.

Most media sources claim my sister Tam died of “heart failure” at the age of 21. In fact, Tam struggled with depression for much of her life, a situation exacerbated by my mother refusing to get her help, insisting that Tam was just “moody.” One afternoon in 2000, after one final fight with Mia, which ended with my mother leaving the house, Tam committed suicide by overdosing on pills. My mother would tell others that the drug overdose was accidental, saying that Tam, who was blind, didn’t know which pills she was taking. But Tam had both an ironclad memory and sense of spatial recognition. And, of course, blindness didn’t impair her ability to count.

Read the whole thing here:

http://mosesfarrow.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-son-speaks-out-by-moses-farrow.html

Mia Farrow: UNICEF "goodwill ambassador"

Roger Friedman wrote on Showbiz 411:

Mia Farrow has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund) since 2000.  Her acolytes often tout it as evidence of her saintly nature.

But now there are calls being made for UNICEF to conduct an investigations of the credible allegations of child abuse by Mia Farrow and determine if she should be allowed to retain her prestigious, image-enhancing title.

...

There is certainly precedent for UNICEF revoking one of its goodwill ambassadorships.  For example in 2010 UNICEF stripped Goodwill Ambassador status from Mexican music superstar Marco Antonio Solís after reports confirmed his longtime ill-treatment of one of his daughters.

Kid takes cat to prom

Okay, I was wrong. I said teenagers shouldn't take inanimate objects as dates to their school proms. Instead of a relaxing evening alone, they were stuck carrying around a cardboard cut-out of a celebrity, or a computer, a blow-up doll or a pineapple in one case. But at least with those things you can put them in the trash, stick them in a corner or put them in the trunk of the car when you realize what a horribly stupid mistake it was to bring them.

This guy brought a cat to the prom. Probably spent the evening trying to keep it from panicking. And look where they are. Out in the open. If the cat had gotten loose, he'd never see it again. Probably got cat hair all over his suit.

A vaguely related thing I saw on TV almost 50 years ago

I lived for a short time in San Antonio, Texas, when I was a kid. There was this show on local TV. Local teen intellectuals would discuss important questions. One question was, would you rather have a horse or a mini-bike? They all said a horse because mini-bikes cause pollution. Except one kid who quipped, "You know what kind of pollution horses make?"

I wouldn't want either one, so I would take a mini-bike because, back then, they only cost about $100 and you could stick it in the back of the garage and forget about it.

I don't know if mini bikes are still a thing, so here's a picture of one.

Mia Farrow was worse than anyone imagined

Moses Farrow has posted an essay about his family, the abuse he and other kids in the family endured from Mia Farrow. Here it is:

https://mosesfarrow.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-son-speaks-out-by-moses-farrow.html

It answers a few questions I've had for a while. One is that Mia Farrow's brother, now in prison for child molestation, did visit Mia Farrow, visited the family, was with the children. Mia Farrow has never shown any concern for his victims or even the fact that he was hanging around with her children.

The abuse the children in that family suffered was far worse than I would have ever imagined. I won't quote the article here. I did save the photo above from it. Click the link and read.

Picture of some child actors

Must be some Father's Day-related publicity photo. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, Barry and Stanley Livingston and Clint and Ronnie Howard are brothers, so it's like they had some unfair advantage over the rest of us. On the other hand, a couple of them are weird-looking and succeeded in spite of that, which would suggest that child stardom was attainable by any of us.

Must have been embarrassing for Stanley Livingston, a teenager among the children. Why is there only one girl? And it's hard to tell, but is Johnny Whittaker's fly open?

Nollywood films available on Amazon

I came across a Roku channel with Nollywood films, but it cost a little more than I wanted to pay so I passed.

"Nollywood" refers to the movie industry in Nigeria. Some years ago, Nigeria was awash with guns, it became dangerous to go out at night so people stayed home and home video became the preferred form of entertainment spawning a movie industry that has stayed on top of technological advances, using the latest prosumer equipment. They switched from videocassettes to DVDs which they sell for a couple bucks each.

I was sitting at work. I thought maybe I should take greater advantage of Amazon Prime even though I'm philosophically opposed and have been trying to spend less. I looked at Amazon on the computer. But what would I order?

I looked up the films of Andy Milligan, the low budget horror auteur, and was surprised to find that several of his movies were available free on streaming video with Amazon Prime. I did a search for "nollywood" and found they had a handful of movies available free on streaming video.

Late at night, I turned on a movie about a white guy in Nigeria who becomes possessed by a ghost. I slept through most of it, but it was well-made as far as I could tell, better than the clips I've seen of earlier Nollywood movies.

Cinema is in flux. Between cheap DVD's, streaming video and Hollywood producing nothing but super hero crap, you think something like that could catch on here?

James Franco, "no meaningful consequences"

James Franco ready to inflict more sex abuse.

You want to get rid of James Franco, you're just going to have to shoot him.

Cracked.com has observed that Franco has suffered "no meaningful consequences" after being exposed as a complete scumbag by the #MeToo movement.

...Franco responded to these allegations on The Late Show like a four-year-old who doesn't want to admit to knocking over his mothers lamp, saying, "If I have done something wrong, I will fix it -- I have to." No additional word from him yet on whether or not he has done something wrong, so no steps have been made to fix it.

Franco currently stars in the acclaimed HBO series The Deuce, which is a look at life in New York during the 1970s, when porn and prostitution were rampant in Manhattan. Which ... seems like the kind of show that puts him in a position to very easily do the things he's been accused of again? And while HBO seemed to want to take a hard stance against working with men accused of harassment (they dropped Louis C.K.'s stand-up specials and removed his show Lucky Louie from the service), when the Franco allegations came around, someone must have walked by them playing a very loud tuba. They've greenlit The Deuce for a second season, with Franco continuing in two lead roles.

Oh, and Franco's IMDb page shows that he's in 13 movies and shows set to come out in 2018/19, which is actually slowing down a bit, considering he had an astounding 15 credits in 2017 alone. So ... that's it, I guess? The accusations, a vague acknowledgement that they exist, and the guy continues to appear in about 40 percent of all Hollywood productions? You can argue among yourselves about what should or shouldn't have happened to him, but it's pretty clear there's not a lot of consistency in how we decide who gets ostracized.

Josh Elvis Weinstein's I Need You To Kill

I've been listening religiously to Andy Kindler and Josh Elvis Weinstein's Thought Spiral podcast. New episodes appear at midnight, Sunday night/Monday morning. I have to get up for work Monday morning but I sit up until 1:30 or 2:00 AM listening.

Weinstein was in the original cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000. He was the first to leave the show and probably had the most success after leaving. He went to Hollywood. There was already someone named Josh Weinstein working there, so he called himself "J Elvis Weinstein". He says he added "Elvis" so his initials would spell "Jew", like he was socking it to all those Hollywood anti-Semites.

No one under thirty should choose their own name. I read about some hippies who didn't name their daughter. She chose the name "Area" when she was four, and, okay, that was kind of a good name. But my brother had a fourteen-year-old music student who insisted on being called Zoro. Now Zoro is a low level celebrity and he's been stuck with that name for decades.

J. Elvis Weinstein's documentary, I Need You To Kill, is now free with Amazon Prime. Acme Comedy Co. owner Louis Lee takes three stand-up comics on tour in the Orient. We find out if they're funny to the people of Asia. They perform in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Singapore. I won't give away how they do.

I was a little surprised at how much comedians in Singapore joke about how oppressive Singapore is.

Louis Lee in the most interesting character in it, talking about how he came to the US from Hong Kong, about starting a comedy club and what he was trying to accomplish. He advises Asian club owners about how to approach it.

A couple of the comics have suits made for them by a tailor in Hong Kong. This must be a common thing. It happened forty-five years ago on an episode of My Three Sons. Don Grady was in Hong Kong, got measured for a suit. He marvels at how quickly they'll have the suit ready for him, then we see the "tailors" go into the back room and get his suit off a rack.

With theme music reminiscent of the theme to Enter the Dragon which is pretty funny.

Miley Cyrus retracts apology

Miley Cyrus has gone on Twitter and retracted her forced apology for the "nude" photo she did ten years ago by Annie Leibovitz. It was published in Vanity Fair. 

I remember when that happened. I heard it on the radio. The public was outraged and the NPR set was as dumb as everyone else. Women called into the show and complained that boys didn't "have to" pose like that. They couldn't distinguish Vanity Fair from Tiger Beat. "They're magazines, ain't they?"

Miley at the time thought the photo looked "pretty and really natural". Annie Leibovitz called it a "simple, classic portrait."

One housewife on the phone with NPR didn't think it was artistic because "how come them colors look funny?"

Boys, by the way, are more likely than girls to appear nude or skimpily clad in the media. How many times were the kids on Malcolm in the Middle walking around in underwear? The young fellows in Stand By Me had a wet underwear scene, Devon Sawa and a couple of other kids had a graphic skinny dipping sequence in another movie---the movie had a lady director and they had to have their moms on the set watching. Poor Corey Haim was as naked as Miley was in his implied nude scene in Lucas, and he was raped on the set of that movie. The late Brad Renfro had a locker room scene in a movie directed by an accused ephebophile.

Gross movie I keep forgetting I already tried to watch

I keep turning on this movie. It looks interesting from the description and the cover art. Foreign, maybe kind of an art house film. I see each time that I tried to watch it before but I don't remember it. Then I turn it on and it starts with this long scene of horses being forced to mate. I can't turn it off fast enough.

All you aspiring filmmakers out there: Don't film horses mating.

Israelis massacre protesters

God's Chosen People are proud today. Their hero Donald Trump has moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and the Israeli Army---what they call "the most moral army in the world"---murdered over fifty peaceful protesters and maimed at least another 1,113.

Gandhi said that nonviolence depends on the people you're up against having some morals. That's why it doesn't work on Zionists.

Turkey has recalled it's ambassadors to the U.S. and Israel and South Africa has recalled its ambassador to Israel.

Serie Noir, 1979, France

Based on the Jim Thompson novel, A Hell of a Woman. The "woman" in this movie was 17-years-old which I found troubling. A little like Taxi Driver. A door-to-door salesman whose boss and wife don't care for him at all becomes involved with a teenage prostitute who bails him out of jail and, barely speaking, convinces him to help rob her aunt who's been acting as her pimp.

I don't know why France always looks like such a hellhole in French movies. Seems to take place mostly in an industrial area. There's money missing at work and this is enough for the guy's boss to have him arrested. There are homosexual Nazi bikers dancing to the music of Elvis Presley. The salesman comes home from work and finds his lazy wife sitting there in a bathrobe surrounded by squalor, but that can happen anywhere---can't blame France. Once his wife leaves him and he cleans the place up, it looks pretty nice.

The girl doesn't say much. Just stares at him. If he says something mildly troubling she starts to leave. She keeps throwing her arms around him. She's terribly annoying.

But I'm giving the wrong impression. The movie was pretty good.

Like Breaking Bad if Walter White had been a moron. Like In Cold Blood if violence hadn't come naturally to the murderers. Like Double Indemnity if everyone in it had been really, really seedy.

Royal wedding

"Prince" Harry and his real father.

So when is this royal wedding? Does it technically qualify as a royal wedding since it's only Harry? He may not even have any royal ancestry. He looks just like the guy his mother was sleeping with nine months before he was born. Harry wanted a DNA test but the queen wouldn't allow it and she may have had more than one reason for this---she and her sisters were conceived through artificial insemination and, since they look nothing alike, may have had different fathers.

Who's going to attend this thing? If the guests were all wiped out in some freak accident, how far down the line of royal succession would they have to go for a new royal family?

Last wedding, the women were going overboard with the hats. They didn't want to waste money on new hats so they just had artificial flowers, fruit or birds glued onto their old hats. They had to ask wedding guests to please not wear stupid-looking hats.

Harry's step-great-grandmother wasn't
invited to his parents' wedding for some reason.

Johnny Depp

 
Well, I guess Johnny Depp is becoming washed up.

I knew he'd been throwing away vast amounts of money on stupid things a la Nicolas Cage. Then there was the wife beating, the lawsuits from former employees including bodyguards who had to tell him when he had controlled substances on his face and try to conceal his condition from the public.

He made over $650 million a year and spent it all on crap.

Well, that's fine. Look what happened to Nicolas Cage---his money problems sparked a bold new phase of his career. Depp could follow in his footsteps, or do something even bolder, like flee the country to escape his debts. He could be the Roman Polanski of debt, unable to return to the United States but continuing to work in one or two select countries.

Iron Man suit stolen

Elderly Republican Robert Downey Jr leaving
Trump "hotel".

Somebody stole the original Iron Man suit from a Hollywood warehouse. It's valued at $325,000.

You know what would be a good idea? Make two or three of the suits yourself. You could secretly to sell them to wealthy collectors who would think they were buying the stolen one. They couldn't very well complain then, could they?

Any really neglected niche audiences?

From Glen Pitre's Yellow Fever.

Well, so mainstream actors like Greg Kinnear and Nicolas Cage are appearing in Christian movies. A gay film, Call Me By Your Name, was made for a mainstream audience.

Is there any audience so neglected by the mass media today that it would gratefully accept the work of a zero budget filmmaker?

The B movie director Edgar Ulmer started out in the '30's making "race films", movies with an all Black cast, and made Ukrainian-language movies for Ukrainian-American audiences. Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7,500 for the Spanish language home video market. It was shot in 16mm and $7,100 went for filmstock and lab costs, so, theoretically, if it had been shot in digital video, it would have cost only $400.

I have a couple of Spanish-language DVD's, and they're terrible. I can see why Rodriguez was confident he could break into that market. He was still in college when he filmed the movie in Mexico. His plan was to go back to school and, when people asked what he did over the summer, he would tell them he made a foreign film.

But from the late '70's to the 1980's, Hollywood made nothing for Black audiences. There were some low budget attempts by independent producers to fill that void, but they didn't take off. An article in a radical film journal discussed this at the time. Filmmakers were trying to adapt Third World Cinema for a visually sophisticated Black American audience used to Hollywood movies.

In the 1950's, there were reportedly 16mm color silent films being shown in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Glen Pitre made a number of Cajun language films in Louisiana.

There used to be a question in Trivial Pursuit or somewhere. There are more Polish-language newspapers in the US than Chinese-language newspapers. Do Polish-speaking Americans need their own movies? Hollywood movies are presumably shown in Poland---are Polish-dubbed Hollywood movies available in the United States? If not, are Polish immigrants so hard up for entertainment that they'd sit through a zero-budget movie just because it was in Polish?

It's not like there's any shortage of movies in the world.

There seems to be a growing number of people who believe the Earth is flat---at least they're making it into the news. What about a nice drama or science fiction movie aimed at them? Would they care?

What about the Amish?

Paul Schrader grew up as a Calvinist. He was seventeen before he snuck away to see his first movie. I think he said it was The Absent-Minded Professor with Fred MacMurray. He was terribly unimpressed. So just because you've never seen a movie, it doesn't mean you're an idiot.

Woody Allen interview cut from documentary

Another bit of Woody Allen news from Page Six. They reported that an interview with Allen was cut from a documentary about the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan.

...Sources told Page Six that Allen — whose Monday-night jazz performances at the hotel have become an Upper East Side institution — sat down to talk to filmmaker Matthew Miele for his new film “Always at the Carlyle.” 

But the chat was cut at the last minute because the sexual assault allegations made against Allen by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow made him a controversial figure amid the #MeToo movement. (He’s denied the allegations.)

Miele confirmed to Page Six that the Allen interview, filmed in the famed Cafe Carlyle cabaret joint, made it into the movie’s rough cut, but investors told him early this year that Allen should be cut out.

Miele told us, “I can’t put my finger on who got skittish about it, but I’m only the director — not the people who put the money up.” He added, “It’s a shame because [Allen is] an elusive guy and he gave us the interview, and it’s just sitting on the cutting room floor.”

...

Footage of Allen — who shot a scene for “Hannah and Her Sisters” at the 5-star hotel — performing appears briefly in the doc, and his name is mentioned a few times by others in interviews.

It was stupid to cut out the interview. Nothing will come of the false accusation against Allen. There's been nothing new in twenty-six years.

Woody Allen update

A little update on Woody Allen's latest work from "Page Six":

Waiting in the wings is Woody Allen’s Amazon movie “A Rainy Day in New York” with Selena Gomez, Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Liev Schreiber. About college seniors here over a rainy weekend. “It’s a love relationship,” Woody says. “I find rain romantic. Unfortunately, while we were shooting it didn’t rain. I had to make some myself.”

The Woody Allen Pages reports:

No doubt those college are the characters played by Selena Gomez,Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning. We suspected as much from what we saw during production, but this seems to confirm it. It also explains why they go to such touristy locations in the film – actually a rarity for Allen these days when he shoots in New York.

We hear Allen is still working on the film’s post production. Page Six also appears to confirm the film will be released by Amazon, who has a deal with Allen at the moment.
The film also stars Rebecca Hall, Jude Law, Diego Luna and Liev Schreiber.

Nothing good ever happens

Some time ago I posted:

"Bibi" Netanyahu is known for being incredibly arrogant and obnoxious. Bill Clinton couldn't stand him, Obama can't stand him. Obama's Chief of Staff didn't want him in the White House. Sarkozy of France talked with Obama about how obnoxious he was at the G-20 summit. A mic happened to be turned on and it made it into the press.

"You're tired of him! What about me?" Obama said. "I have to deal with him every day."

...

So, when Trump has to deal with "Bibi", will he be charmed by a fellow obnoxious loudmouth, or will he be as offended as everyone else but will happily say so loudly and publicly?

Yeah, now we know.

You know what it reminds me of? Marcel Ophul's documentary, Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. They interviewed a simple Bolivian peasant who knew absolutely nothing about Barbie but was tremendously impressed at the way he walked around acting like an ubermensch.

There are people who think Trump is easily swayed by flattery, but being arrogant and obnoxious is the real key.

Kim Kardashian, global warming

Katy Perry gave a speech on the effect of global warming on the world's children. She did this as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. And now they're reporting that she rushed Kim Kardashian her long phony nails by private jet.

http://people.com/style/met-gala-2018-katy-perry-flew-kim-kardashian-nails-private-jet/

But, then, Al Gore commutes by private jet between two mansions and vacation home. He's single. His wife dumped him. He should be living in a rented room, maybe a one bedroom apartment. How does he justify the environmental damage he's causing? I'm not denying climate change, I want people like Gore and Katy Perry to stop contributing to it.

Ralph Nader lives in an apartment. He has no carpeting. He used to have an old black and white TV, but I would imagine he replaced it by now. He doesn't own a car. When he left the Army, he bought a lot of pairs of Army dress shoes he got cheaply and wore them for years. He eats organic food. He cooks a lot so he can have left-overs.

In Communist countries, housing was arranged so people could live close to their jobs. They lived in apartments, used public transportation. There wasn't the massive overproduction you see in consumer capitalism. Yet I've seen people decry global warming then attack Communism for not emitting enough carbon.

People used to point out the absurdity of launching a space shuttle to study the destruction of the ozone layer when launching the space shuttle helped destroy it. But no one points out the environmental damage caused by the rocket that scumbag Afrikaner Elon Musk launched as a vanity project.

Poor Kirk Cameron

I was listening to a recent Thought Spiral podcast. In the midst of a discussion of Jo Anne Worley, Josh Elvis Weinstein mentioned his time working on Greg Kinnear's talk show. What's Kinnear doing now, Andy Kindler asked. Weinstein said he had done some Christian movies, movies that made a lot of money but no one really hears about.

I googled it. Read an article about it. It was true. Christian movies are making a lot of money (some of them) and mainstream stars like Kinnear are appearing in them.

Where does that leave poor Kirk Cameron? He was callously replaced by Nicolas Cage in the Left Behind remake.  He's like a Christian version of Richard Gere. Gere's a devout Buddhist. He worships the Dalai Lama, but the Dalai Lama says that his favorite actor is John Wayne and they declared Steven Seagal to be a "Tulku", a reincarnated 17th century lama.

Cameron couldn't get cast in a mainstream movie now. All he can do is Christian movies but he's tied his religion to politics and he's no match for mainstream stars.

Remember when Kirk Cameron wouldn't kiss an actress playing his wife in a movie? He won't kiss any woman he's not married to. Who knows what else he'd refuse to do. Christian filmmakers can save themselves a lot of trouble by casting mainstream actors.

Teenagers wrecking cars

We were out of high school due to a teacher's strike. There were substitutes, but I wasn't about to cross no picket line. The cops came down and roughed up the teachers for some reason.

A couple of friends of mine were driving down the street unsupervised. They were in a Volkswagen Fastback. The guy driving began weaving between the lines in the street. He explained later that he was pretending the Volkswagen was a Porsche. The car tipped over onto its right side. The window was open and his friend in the passenger seat was fearful his face would be scraped off onto the pavement as the car slid to a stop. They got up and walked out through the windshield that had fallen out. Striking teachers from a grade school came running to help. I don't know if they saw they acting like morons before wrecking the car.

Then, perhaps a year later, the passenger in the car (I'll call him "J") tried to get a driver's license. He went to take the driver's test. He borrowed a car from another friend's mother because it had an automatic transmission and was more like the car he used in Driver's Ed. The woman giving him the test told him to turn around in the parking lot and he ran into another car and put a big dent in the fender. 

That evening I got a phone call from J. He asked if I wanted to go out and do something with him and the Volkswagen guy. I said okay. They'd come and pick me up.

I was surprised when J pulled up in front of my house. He was driving an old rear-engine Fiat coupe his mother bought for $800. 

I told him I thought he failed his driver's test. He said he did. He was driving without a license. 

Headlines flashed in my mind. Teens perish in fiery crash. But----I got in the car with him. I had never ridden with him driving before and I was surprised at how bad he was. He had no confidence at all.

We took a back road through a park. It was a very narrow, winding one lane road in the side of a hill. As we drove there was another car coming at us, so he turned off onto an even narrower, more winding road that was even higher on the side the hill. There was a ditch on the right and a steep drop-off on the left. We drove along at ten or fifteen miles per house, and that turned out to be too fast. We were going around a curve. He started going off into the ditch. I thought, well, this won't be so bad. It would be a relief to get out of having to ride with him.

But J over compensated. He swerved to the left away from the ditch and the car rolled over twice as it rolled thirty or forty feet down what was sort of a cliff. I assumed I'd be killed or horribly injured, but no, I was fine. I sat there marveling, but J asked if I was okay and I said yeah, then we climbed out. I just wanted to walk home, but J got out his flashlight and wanted to inspect the damage.

I don't know why I paid for the tow truck. J had a job. But I had money on me. The driver shined a light down the hill and said, "You did THAT?"

He hooked a cable to the car and pulled it out.

J had it towed to the parking lot in student housing where he lived. His mother and stepfather were both going to college.

I wonder if he ever paid me back. I remember going the next two weeks without any money.

I walked back up there the next day. There were rocks with red paint, chunks of Bondo. I looked down and there were J's glasses. I picked them up. The frames were ruined but the lenses were fine.

"Here, I found your glasses," I said later.

J and his parents were terribly poor and I didn't know how expensive glasses were. They were very happy and invited me over for Kentucky Fried Chicken to celebrate me finding the glasses.

A few years ago, J was declared legally insane after stabbing and slightly injuring a postal worker and is now in the State Hospital. 

After his parents graduated, they moved to Chicago. They attached a tow bar to the Fiat, loaded it with their stuff and used it as a trailer. Which is weird. 

I only bring this up because I just saw this commercial for auto insurance where a teen comes in his parents punish him for wrecking the family car. Does this seem right? Is a car accident a deliberate act? 

A TV commercial is a film of sorts. It's cinema related.

I paid for J's car to be towed because he was afraid to call his parents.

I was slightly acquainted with this other guy in high school. He totaled his parents' Volvo. I had some friends who parents were friends with his parents. They hated him and thought his wrecking the car was sign of what a jerk he was. He's now a playwright, director and a major figure in Jewish theater. 

I knew several women who were outraged that a woman didn't punish her daughter for surviving a serious car accident. "There need to be consequences!"

A few weeks ago, I was driving down this street on the edge of town. There was a small SUV crashed into a tree and a larger SUV parked there. It looked like the wreck had happened some time earlier, but I stopped. Other than having a cell phone I could be of no help to anyone, but I got out and walked up there.

There was no one in the wrecked SUV. The airbag had deployed. 

The power window of the bigger SUV rolled down and a skinny teenager waved and said, "It was me!" His mother said everything was fine, nobody hurt. 

Forty years ago, that kid would have been killed. I guess now with the seat belts, airbags and crash tests, being in a car wreck is no longer its own reward.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston, 1967)

I'd heard of this movie for years but just watched it for the first time.

In technicolor but it looked almost monochrome, the colors faded to a shade of gold. Based on the novel by Carson McCullers.

Brian Kieth and Marlon Brando play Army officers. Kieth is sleeping with Brando's wife, Elizabeth Taylor. Kieth's wife, played by Julie Harris, is mentally ill after the death of a child.

A little hard to believe that Brian Kieth was starring in Family Affair at the time.

An Army private is a peeping tom, watching the goings on in Brando's house. After seeing Elizabeth Taylor (or her body double) naked, he starts breaking in and spending the night gazing at her while she sleeps (she and Brando have separate bedrooms.) Good thing she never got up to go to the bathroom. There are stables there and the officers and their wives enjoy horseback riding. The private does, too, except he likes riding the horse naked and frolicking this way. He used a switchblade to unlatch the screen door to their house. It didn't present him this way, but he seemed like a dangerous pervert to me.

Brando becomes infatuated with the private and starts following him around. He tells his wife at one point that he wishes he could be an enlisted man again, hanging around the barracks.

Marlon Brando was known for mumbling. That combined with his phony Southern accent made him unintelligible at times.

With Robert Forster as the nudist private and Zorro David as the apparently gay Filipino houseboy.

Obsolete second-hand once-cutting edge camcorder

Ah, digital video! And not just digital video, but inexpensive, obsolete, prosumer standard definition digital video! I myself bought an old Canon XL1. Wikipedia has a long list of feature films shot on them. Think of how professional you'd look with one! And it was cheaper than a vintage PXL2000. I looked at footage shot with them on YouTube and it didn't look very good.

You know how they say to never use the built-in mic on your camcorder? That doesn't necessarily apply to these once-cutting edge machines. Jon Jost said somewhere that he used to just use the built-in mic.

Apparently the old XL1's are still used in film schools. The one I have only films in the old 4x5 aspect ratio which will force you to do more close-ups which you'll want to do anyway filming in standard definition.

I've always taken pride in owning things that, at one time, only the wealthy could afford. I had a 20-year-old luxury car I got for $800. Of course, there were reliability problems, it was a terrible gas hog. It was probably an unwise purchase. It impressed the rubes, but I would walk around, looking at all the people driving their late-model Japanese cars and wonder how they did it. 

Like the time I was wracked by feelings of inferiority watching the film students, one with a camcorder that cost several thousand dollars and several others with digital SLRs. They were filming a live music performance but it turned out they forgot to plug into the sound board so it was all for naught. I wouldn't have made that mistake. I felt redeemed even though I hadn't done anything.

That Chinese prom dress again

Had another entry about this here. 

So, quickly, the girl's mother says that the thing in the photo where they're doing the praying hands thing was from some sort of internet meme. That make more sense than all the girls doing this to celebrate another girl's prom dress.

And now the people of Communist China are weighing in. They like the dress and are pleased the girl wore it. A Chinese fashion blogger said that there was nothing sacred about the dress. If you see a woman in China wearing one, she's probably either a waitress or a bride.

But I can see why reactions would be different in China where ethnic Chinese obviously aren't a minority.

YouTube takes down tribute to Palestinian journalists murdered by Israeli snipers

From the posting on Mondoweiss.net:

It begins with a Palestinian child saying “We shall overcome” and an image of Martin Luther King Jr. and then in many still pictures of the “Great March of Return” conveys the strength of the unarmed resistance to the blockade–including the killing of Yaser Murtaja, the Palestinian journalist who was one of six Palestinian journalists shot by Israeli snipers on April 6.

The imagery is by Sana Kassem, and the video was posted by Norman Finkelstein yesterday on youtube. The song is “Wings to Fly,” by Susan Boyle. The copy accompanying the video was simply: “A video dedicated to the people of Gaza as they struggle to break out of Israel’s infernal prison.”

Then Youtube took it down today, Finkelstein says, and he and Kassem have posted it now on Vimeo.

Read the full post here:

http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/youtube-sensational-incitement/

May God Bless the People of Gaza from Sana Kassem on Vimeo.

Woody Allen performing at Carlyle Hotel

The Huffington Post reports that crowds are paying $165 a head to see Woody Allen and friends perform an especially unpopular style of jazz at New York's Carlyle Hotel. The tone of the article suggests that these are callous rich people---otherwise they would be stamping their feet demanding that Allen and Soon-yi get divorced immediately. Why, Dylan Farrow is probably lying in a fetal position right now, crying her beady little eyes out, and do they care?

"Many fans apparently don’t care about the allegations against Allen. During both visits to the Carlyle Hotel, HuffPost reporters observed a sellout crowd, with people lining up for hours," the article said.

Or maybe they cared enough to read about the case and concluded the accusations were false as did authorities in New York and Connecticut who investigated the allegations.

The article goes on to attack Allen's music.

Prom season

What is it---prom season? So far this year, one girl has made it into the news for taking a cardboard cutout to the prom. That decision will haunt her for the rest of her life. Another girl has been attacked for wearing a Chinese dress---for cultural appropriation. And she and her friends were photographed doing this:

They shouldn't have done that praying hands thing. It's believed they were mocking the Chinese. But why were the other girls going along with it? Surely the world doesn't revolve around that girl just because she's wearing a Chinese dress.

[The girl's mother said this was from some sort of internet meme unrelated to the dress.]

She said she found the dress in a second hand store.

"My culture is not your prom dress," tweeted one critic. 

Well, no, that definitely was her prom dress.

If she were a dress designer stealing a traditional Chinese design it would be a problem, but I'm not sure that buying an actual Chinese dress should be an issue. She wasn't wearing some sacred vestment as evening wear. She wore it as intended, not as a costume.

Prom dresses aren't terribly attractive in general, and the boys' outfits are no picnic, either. I'm impressed that they own their own suits, but this is a common problem with teenage boys----their parents buy them one suit or sport coat and since they have only one, it has to be suitable for weddings, funerals and any other occasion. A Chinese or Chinese-style shirt would have been a less stodgy alternative to a dress shirt and tie.

I myself have taken to wearing a Nepali shirt as a dress shirt. I don't know if it's a traditional or an avant-garde Nepali design, or if the design has nothing to do with Nepal, but I've gotten nothing but compliments.