Peter Fonda horribly vindicated

Barron Trump

You might recall that Peter Fonda tweeted that Barron Trump should be rent from the arms of his ghastly "parents" and locked in a cage full of pedophiles. It might get the First "Lady" to oppose her "husband's" inhuman policy separating children from their parents when they apply for asylum in the United States.

I understood what he meant. Treat them the way they treat people and see how they like it for a change. But I didn't understand why he threw pedophiles into the mix.

But Fonda was right. The Salvadoran government reports that at least three Salvadoran children Trump imprisoned were molested by guards. There have been other reports of sexual abuse already and you know there'll be more. It's appalling but not terribly surprising.

Dick Cavett is loaded

Dick Cavett is trying to sell his house. Has reduce the price from $60 million to a modest $48.5 million. I don't know why, but I'm rather surprised. Maybe it was cheap when he bought it and values have gone up.

Cavett is 81. I don't know how his health is, but even now I'd want to live someplace where I could get an ambulance quickly. The place burned to the ground in 1997. I don't know if that meant it took the fire department a while to get there.

Cavett and his late wife, Carrie Nye, had the place rebuilt. The plans for it didn't exist so it was rebuilt largely from memory.

I don't like the kitchen.

Westworld, 1973

I had this friend in grade school who loved this one scene in Westworld. Richard Benjamin, wearing only a towel, bursts though a door and shoots Yul Brenner menacing his friend, James Brolin, in their hotel room. I didn't especially like that scene because I had always found walking around in a towel to be a constant struggle to keep it from falling off. Jean-Pierre Leaud modestly clutching his towel in The 400 Blows was far more realistic. But, seeing it again, that was a pretty good scene.

The movie was about an amusement park where you could shoot or have sex with robots.

The movie western was a dying genre in 1973 and I didn't understand why people would go to a theme park made to look like a cowboy movie. Medieval World and Roman World in the same theme park made even less sense to me at the time.

Yul Brenner dressed as he was in The Magnificent Seven. Nice to see Richard Benjamin as an action star, but they should have treated Dick Van Patten better.

It might make a good double feature with The Stepford Wives (1975).

Roman Polanski, Carnage, 2011

Roman Polanski can't step foot in an English-speaking country without being arrested, but he still wants success in the United States. He keeps making movies in English with American stars. I guess that's why they do it. When the British made a movie based on Mr Bean, they had Mr Bean come to America for the stated reason that the American market was the hardest one to break into.

I get tired of reading subtitles, but I want dubbing. I know there are perfectly good dubbed versions of older foreign films, but you can't get them. There are Soviet movies on DVD where you can choose between dubbing and subtitling, but I haven't seen that with movies from any other country.

I just watched Polanski's Carnage. I don't know how much credit he should get for it. It was "based on the play" by Yasima Reza which I think means it was simply the play by Yasmina Reza. The translator was in the credits. It reminded me why I don't want to go to plays although I wonder how they did the vomiting scene on stage.

Two couples meet. They don't know each other. The 11-year-old son of one couple hit the son of the other couple in the face with a stick and wrecked a couple of his teeth. They're trying to be polite but they're naturally rather upset. The couples argue, then the characters argue with their own spouses. It's pretty dreary.

This thing starred Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christopher Waltz and John C Reilly. Polanski's son, Elvis, plays the violent pre-teen. Yes, Polanski named his son "Elvis".

It might make a good double feature with The Dinner--Steve Coogan and Richard Gere play brothers who, with their wives, meet for dinner to discuss the situation with their awful children. I'd watch The Dinner first. It was a better movie.

I would have suggested Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as a second feature or Exterminating Angel,  but they would just be too much.

Slow West (2015)

There was the movie Utu (1983), which was SORT of a western filmed and set in New Zealand in the 1870s. Double barreled shotguns was the weapon of choice. After the Brits massacre a Maori village, a Maori soldier sets out for revenge.

Slow West was another New Zealand-made western, this one set the United States in the 1870s, a New Zealand-British co-production. The landscape in New Zealand was more interesting than the western US and way more interesting than locations in Spain used in spaghetti westerns.

A cute Scottish youth named Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) comes to the United States to find his girlfriend who fled Scotland with her father after her father accidentally killed Jay's uncle. Jay doesn't know that there's a bounty on his girlfriend and her father. He hires a bounty hunter to accompany him for protection. He doesn't realize that he's leading him and a number of competing bounty hunters right to her.

It avoided almost all the things I hate about westerns, the ugly clothes, the ugly towns, the ugly garish saloons, people whose only recreation was hanging around in bars and men whose only dream in life is to someday own a ranch.

Surprisingly violent considering it premiered at Sundance.

Available on Netflix.

Teaching the young fellow to shave with a really sharp knife.

Mia Farrow loved John McCain who hated her children

Pro-racist Mia Farrow with children John McCain hated.
She was later completely estranged from three of the four Asian kids.

"John McCains [sic] death is a reminder of how deeply we long for decency, principles, empathy, honor, honesty and the values that have defined America."

--Mia Farrow

"I hate the gooks."

--John McCain, 2000, explaining why he used the term "gook".

 

Charlie Hebdo's worse than ever

Charlie Hebdo's cover about the bridge collapse in Italy. I have no idea what the joke is here.

A few years ago, after some young fellows shot up the Charlie Hebdo office, I wisely wrote:

It's too bad for them, but if those guys were really France's greatest cartoonists, their deaths might be a boon to cartooning as an art form. It gets them out of the way and hopefully makes room for someone who can actually draw and has something funny or intelligent to say.

They're still stupid and unfunny, but the drawing is somewhat better. Look at the bridge and the wrecked car. But what do those dumb Frenchies think is clever here?

After those guys shot up the office in 2015, some argued that Charlie Hebdo was actually ANTI-racist, but Americans just couldn't understand the French sense of humor. Which was nonsense. I've seen enough Jerry Lewis movies to understand the way these people think. I've seen French comedies and there's nothing esoteric about them. If anything, the French are dumber than we are.

A bit of delay in filming The Fiddling Horse

 

I transcribed some of the latest Thought Spiral podcast (next one comes out Monday.) 

On Test Show 66 of Thought Spiral, Andy Kindler and Josh "Elvis" Weinstein discussed their preparing to fly to Louisiana where they were going to begin filming the independent film, The Fiddling Horse directed by C.J. Wallis.

But, at the beginning of Test Show #67, Josh informed us:

Josh: "So suffice it to say--well, maybe not--but we aren't in Louisiana."

Andy: "Baton Rouge."

Josh: "There's been a little bit of a stop on the movie. But--"

Andy: "After you edited around any plot twists."

Josh: "Yeah. I did take out some---any of our doubts."

Andy: "So it was just This is great…This is great…This is great. Well! I guess I'm leaving tomorrow...!"

Josh: "Why would you want to dump a bunch of doubts on a director before you go do his movie?"

Andy: "Right. I love CJ Wallis---"

Josh: "As do I."

Andy: "--and I sent him a very, very, very nice text and---I sound like I'm trying to do an impression of an asshole."

Josh: "I did, too, and he said we were the nicest---we were very nice."

Andy: "Yeah, and the truth was, we both compared notes. Neither one of us doesn't like to know if we're going to leave in the morning…. And then I always root for it not to happen as the night goes on because I'm not ready…. Now I'm assuming this movie, Fiddling Horse---you assumed that I'd spent the rest of the weekend familiarizing myself with all the lines."

Josh: "No, I didn't. I really thought you'd do it on the plane to Louisiana."

Andy: "But something tells me I need to maybe start earlier, but I'm still---"

Josh: "There's a lot there."

Andy: "There's a lot there."

Josh: "Yeah. And I get the sense he's not like, Hey, let's do forty takes, on this schedule of his."

Andy: "Oh, yeah, yeah, but he does have alternate--if we want to do an alternate take--if I say, Hey--what's your character's name?"

Josh: "Hey, can we do this six lines shorter?, he'll say..."

Andy: "What is your character--I forgot your character because I don't think I knew…"

Josh: "It doesn't matter."

Andy: "Is it Eddie?"

Josh: "Sure. It's Eddie. No. It's not Eddie."

Andy: "It's not Bugman."

Josh: "Well…I'm going to put a little Bugman in it."

Andy: "Why do I have Bugman on my brain? That's a character in this script which I enjoyed very much. I was so happy that I got to read the script. Because I read parts of it before."

Josh: "I still haven't read the whole thing. But I read my part."

Andy: "It's great. He caught my voice and I think, What's been missing from show business? Movies starring me!"

Josh: "I think there's definitely an Andy-shaped void in the cinema."

Andy: "Imagine my face magnified---how many times is it bigger than my actual body? Twenty times bigger on the screen?"

Josh: "Your body is twenty times bigger, your head is eighteen times bigger."

Andy: "I just have an algorithm--eighteen times bigger?"

Josh: "Body's twenty times bigger, your head is eighteen times bigger."

Andy: "I forgot…because of pi, right?"

Josh: "Because of what?"

Andy: "Pi..."

Josh: "Yeah. Right."

Andy: "So, the thing that was weird about this weekend---as you can see, I wrote down some notes."

Josh: "Yeah. Nothing. I wrote a couple down."

Andy: "Well. You would."

…

Andy: "So we didn't go away, but I really loved not going away. When I knew I wasn't going away, I felt like I was---"

Josh: "Isn't that true in life in general, that not having to go is always better? The cancelled plans where it's not your fault."

Andy: "It's true in a way…"

Josh: "It always feels a little bit good when someone cancels plans."

…

45 minutes later:

Andy: "I think that CJ Wallis is the greatest person in the world. I love his energy. But he does oper--the way he--not operates---the way he makes decisions--It's happening."

Josh: "I think that's an indie filmmaker thing. And I can respect it. And the philosophy is this: No one in the world is that encouraging of you making an indie film. There are people who get excited about it, but in general the world doesn't give a shit that you're making a movie. So the attitude you have to take is, I am going to charge forward until someone tells me I have to stop."

Andy: "That's exactly right. That's what he does."

Josh: "And he does it and I respect it. I'm more cautious about it because when I was making it I was just throwing my own money at problems, so it was a different thing… But I think that's how you have to operate to make shit, is just charge forward and act as if  until someone says you, No, it's not as if . I don't think his whole thing fell apart, I just think he got a little roadblock thrown up and we're going to be back at it."

Andy: "Right, but he has in his personality, just like I have it in my personality to tell everybody I'll answer your email---he has it in his personality to say It's just going to be a couple of days...

Josh: "I just want communication, and he's doing that pretty well right now."

Andy: "I think what he, if he goes--if anyone goes radio silent, it means they can't talk to you right now…. I want to make sure Esther Ku is still on board."

Esther Ku.

Josh: "She's on the little poster he had published so..."

Andy: "And in the meanwhile, I don't think that I should put all my eggs in that independent film basket."

Josh: "...but put enough of an egg to learn your lines."

Asia Argento covered with tattoos

And one last thing about Asia Argento: What the hell kind of idiot actress covers herself with tattoos? If she's in a movie she'll either have to cover them with make-up or get permission of the tattoo artist for his work to appear in a movie. I can understand some stupid kid thinking that a getting a tattoo would be a GREAT idea, but this is a middle aged woman. Does she think that's attractive?

I don't know what was wrong with Anthony Bourdain.

I truly don't understand the tattoo craze. It's been going on for years. I've never seen a tattoo that enhanced anyone's appearance in any way.

One time I saw a documentary about pornography. There was a young woman whose mother was acting as her agent. A pornographic film producer commented that her lack of tattoos would be a boon to her career.

Even a dirty, filthy pornographer knows how ugly tattoos are.

Asia Argento, JT Leroy

Laura Albert, the monster behind the J.T. Leroy fraud.

Asia Argento started out as a very nice woman staying in touch with a child actor she worked with. When I see former child stars in trouble, I always wonder where all the adults are who they had worked with. Movie stars showed up at John Gotti's trial---you'd think they'd show some support when some poor kid was in trouble. Like Dick Van Patten who helped Adam Rich get into rehab.

I saw The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. It was sort of like Sleepers or the alien abduction movie Communion. They were supposedly true stories that might have seemed plausible in book form but looked absurd under the harsh glare of the klieg lights.

I had read about the book by J.T. Leroy and was a bit shocked. I went to a bookstore and looked at a copy. It was written in the pseudo poetic style peculiar to literary frauds. I've read true stuff written by teenagers and they're often pretty good writers, but they're good because they're straightforward.

The book in this case was written by a middle-aged woman impersonating a teenage boy prostitute. Why do literary frauds always impersonate suffering children? It's incredibly callous. I don't know what drew Argento to the story, but the woman who called herself J.T. Leroy didn't show any sympathy for homeless kids who had to resort to prostitution. A group of street kids in San Francisco issued a statement pointing this out when the fraud was exposed.

Jimmy Bennett wasn't kidding

Some stuff that appeared in TMZ:

It's all true. It's all horribly true.

Argento, Bennett and somebody else in happier times.

The suffering of the young

You know how John Waters talked about making his own movie stars for his early movies? I suggested somewhere on this horrible blog that you could do the same thing---create your own YouTube celebrities before you have them star in your zero budget movie. I can't imagine serious actors letting you screw around with their lives that way, but it was a thought.

I read one independent filmmaker who said he didn't do much with opening credits since no one ever heard of his actors anyway. I would do the opposite---put their names in huge letters. Make the audience think they've missed something by not knowing who these people are. They're the inadequate ones, not your stars.

But now I hear that young people are suffering the stress levels of a D-list celebrity because of social media.

Being a celebrity of any kind sounds horrible, but there's something in the adolescent mind that makes it terribly appealing. There must be a way to teach young people the joy of passing through life without having everybody know your business.

Asia Argento denies accusation

Asia Argento and Anthony Bourdain

Asia Argento noted that Jimmy Bennett was having financial problems and had sued his own parents before threatening to sue her for $3.5 million. Her boyfriend, Anthony Bourdain, thought he was dangerous and Argento wanted to help the young fellow out so they agreed to pay him over $300 thousand.

“Bennett knew my boyfriend, Anthony Bourdain, was a man of great perceived wealth and had his own reputation as a beloved public figure to protect,” Argento’s statement reads.

“Anthony insisted the matter be handled privately and this was also what Bennett wanted. Anthony was afraid of the possible negative publicity that such [a] person, whom he considered dangerous, could have brought upon us.”

“We decided to deal compassionately with Bennett’s demand for help and give it to him. Anthony personally undertook to help Bennett economically, upon the condition that we would no longer suffer any further instructions in our life,” she continued.

Rose McGowan has defended Argento, or has at least suggested we not immediately condemn her, which, not surprisingly, has resulted in McGowan being attacked for hypocrisy by right-wing anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers. But the fact is that most of the men accused in the #MeToo movement had multiple accusers. The public and the press withheld judgement on those who with only one accuser in a single alleged incident.

I would be happy to know that the kid wasn't abused and that Argento was just a very nice woman helping a troubled former child actor she had worked with and befriended. 

I just know Trump will be re-elected

They complain about the news media having given so much free airtime to Donald Trump, like Hillary Clinton couldn't have gotten on TV if she wanted to. Not even Rachel Maddow could get an interview with Clinton. At one of her campaign events, they kept the press at bay and set up big white noise machines so they couldn't hear what they were saying.

But now it continues. Hours and hours and hours of continuous news about Donald Trump. Yes, most of it is negative, but that was true during the campaign, too.

I don't know if this is going to work. I didn't think it would be that bad sweating it out for four years, but eight years of Trump is too much.

After all those years of corporate Democrats attacking Ralph Nader and Jill Stein for taking votes away from right-wing Democrats, the Democratic Party hasn't said a word about Joe Crowley running as third party candidate. Crowley is the corporate Democratic incumbent defeated in the primary by Democratic Socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Crowly is continuing to run on the Working Families Party ticket thus splitting the Democratic vote. Corporate Dems would rather lose to a Republican than have a left-wing Democrat win.

The First Deadly Sin (1980)

Frank Sinatra plays a police detective. His wife is in the hospital getting worse. He relieves the stress of his dying wife by focusing on his case, an apparent serial killer.

The movie seemed sketchy. We never see how Frank Sinatra gets around. Does he drive around himself? There was a shot of a traffic jam at one point but we never see him trying to deal with it or find a place to park. It goes from interior scene to interior scene. He decides on his suspect without much evidence and then breaks into his apartment to look for evidence.

They went with gritty realism with scenes of the coroner performing an autopsy, close-ups of surgery being performed on his wife.

A good performance by Frank Sinatra. Bruce Willis is in there somewhere---I didn't notice him but he's in an uncredited role. JamesWhitmore as the coroner.

Roman Polanski was going to direct until he was dropped due to his raping a child.

Fay Dunaway was nominated for a Razzie for worst actress playing Sinatra's wife but I thought she was fine.

Weinstein accuser Argento paid off kid she sexually assaulted

It's being reported that Asia Argento, an Italian actress and director who was one of the first to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment/assault/rape, paid $380,000 to former teenage actor Jimmy Bennett who she sexually assaulted when he was 17 and she was 39.

This happened in 2013 but it's only been in the last couple of months that the Bennett was paid.

Argento is the daughter of Italian horror director Dario Argento. She directed and played Bennett's mother in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.

According to the New York Times:

On May 9, 2013, the day they met for a reunion in her room at a Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, Calif., she posted on Instagram: “Waiting for my long lost son my love @jimmymbennett in trepidation #marinadelrey smoking cigarettes like there was no next week.” 

...

Mr. Bennett, who has an eye condition that prevents him from driving, arrived at Ms. Argento’s hotel room that morning with a family member, according to his notice of intent. 

The document lays out Mr. Bennett’s account: Ms. Argento asked the family member to leave so she could be alone with the actor. She gave him alcohol to drink and showed him a series of notes she had written to him on hotel stationery. Then she kissed him, pushed him back on the bed, removed his pants and performed oral sex. She climbed on top of him and the two had intercourse, the document says. She then asked him to take a number of photos. 

Later that day she posted a close-up of their faces on Instagram with the caption, “Happiest day of my life reunion with @jimmymbennett xox,” and added that “jimmy is going to be in my next movie and that is a fact, dig that jack.” That post and others were included with the notice of intent, along with three photos apparently taken by Mr. Bennett that depict him and Ms. Argento in bed, their unclothed torsos exposed. (Only one of the photos taken in bed shows both their faces.) 

The two had lunch, and Mr. Bennett headed home to Orange County, where he lived with his parents. As he was driven home, according to his claim, he began to feel “extremely confused, mortified, and disgusted.”

The article said,

The fallout from “a sexual battery” was so traumatic that it hindered Mr. Bennett’s work and income and threatened his mental health, according to a notice of intent to sue that his lawyer sent in November to Richard Hofstetter, Mr. Bourdain’s longtime lawyer, who was also representing Ms. Argento at the time. 

... 

Mr. Bennett’s notice of intent asked for $3.5 million in damages for the intentional infliction of emotional distress, lost wages, assault and battery. Mr. Bennett made more than $2.7 million in the five years before the 2013 meeting with Ms. Argento, but his income has since dropped to an average of $60,000 a year, which he attributes to the trauma that followed the sexual encounter with Ms. Argento, his lawyer wrote.

Here they are together in The Heart is Deceitful...

The poor kid already had to sue his parents. They barred him from the family home after spending all his money. He had earned $1.5 million but has nothing to show for it.

What the hell was wrong with that woman? 

A more recent photo of the boy.

People should probably stop stealing planes

Everybody's stealing planes. A guy in Seattle stole a commuter plane at the airport, flew some stunts he may have learned playing computer games and died when the plane crashed. They think he was suicidal. And in Utah, a man stole a plane and flew it into his house after he was arrested for domestic battery. He was killed, of course. His wife and child who were in the house survived.

This happened in the Soviet Union around 1950. A ground crew member deicing a plane climbed in and took off in it. This was a twin engine transport plane, the Soviet equivalent of a DC-3. There were apartments nearby for workers at the airfield. His wife had just left him. She moved into another apartment with her new boyfriend. Over the radio, he told the control tower he was going to crash the plane into the apartment building.

The apartments were evacuated. Jet fighters were called in to shoot down the plane but they had to get it away from buildings first. The man had been a pilot in World War Two and managed to out-maneuver the MiGs as they tried to herd him away from the buildings. The fighter pilots gave up and left and the man landed the plane and surrendered.

He was charged with theft of government property and over sixty counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to death but execution was delayed at least in part because they wanted to know how he was able to outmaneuver the fighters. He wound up serving only three years in prison before being released.

Camera rental

For some reason I had a pop-up ad appear for camera rental. You can rent an Arri Amira, just like the one used to film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for $2,399 a week. I don't know if that includes the time it take UPS to get it to you. You wouldn't tell them to send it ground.

A Red Epic-W 8K camera is a modest $1,355 a week.

A Panasonic Lumix GH4 with 4k video is a $83 for a week.

Lenses would double the cost of any of these.

Toolbox Murders

The Toolbox Murders was a perfectly nice movie about a man who goes around murdering women using a different item from his toolbox each time. It had Pamelyn Ferdin who I always recognized as the voice of Lucy in some of the Charlie Brown cartoons. She was in the TV series Blondie with the kid who was the voice of Charlie Brown, she played Felix Unger's daughter on The Odd Couple, and had the title role in Happy Birthday, Wanda June. 

I saw The Toolbox Murders (1978) long ago. It was crap, of course. But I just clicked on The Toolbox Murders 2 on Roku. It was far more ambitious. But is that what you want from a movie of this type? I don't want to see piles of rotting corpses. It's just awful.

It had Bruce Dern in it which is weird.

I would be the Edward D. Wood, Jr, of slasher films. Ed Wood grew up watching B horror movies in the 1930s. And he went on to make movies that would have been almost passable as B horror movies in the 1930s. But he was doing it in the 1950's and it didn't work at all.

I'd be making pleasant, modest slasher movies. One person killed, like, every ten minutes. Nothing upsetting or disturbing, at least not to the sort of person wants to see movies like that. I would be an abject failure. But I would have my----well, no, I wouldn't have my self-respect. I'd have pretty much the opposite of self-respect.

Last Tango in Paris, Stranger Things

In an interview about Last Tango In Paris, Maria Schneider talked about mistreatment on the set working with Bertolucci. "I think Bertolucci is over-rated and he never really made anything after Last Tango that had the same impact.

"He was fat and sweaty and very manipulative, both of Marlon and myself, and would do certain things to get a reaction from me. Some mornings on set he would be very nice and say hello and on other days, he wouldn't say anything at all.

"I was too young to know better. Marlon later said that he felt manipulated, and he was Marlon Brando, so you can imagine how I felt."

There was an infamous scene in the movie. If you google "last tango in paris" the suggestion "last tango in paris butter" will come up.

"That scene wasn't in the original script.," Schneider said. "...They only told me about it before we had to film the scene and I was so angry.

"I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script, but at the time, I didn't know that...

"I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn't console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take."

Stranger Things

I had heard this before about Last Tango in Paris. I was reminded of it when I read this about Stranger Things:

Stranger Things fans have grown concerned after learning of the circumstances surrounding an on-screen kiss between two child actors in the Netflix show's most recent season.

The kiss in question, which took place during the season 2 finale, happened between Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and new character Max (Sadie Sink) at the climactic Hawkins Middle School Snow Ball dance - something, it emerged on after-show Beyond Stranger Things, was unscripted and sprung upon both actors.

15-year-old Sink recounts the build-up to the moment that Ross Duffer brands “all [her] own fault.”

She said: “I get there, the first day of Snowball… one of you, I think it was you Ross, you say, ‘Ooh, Sadie, you ready for the kiss?’ I’m like, ‘What! No! That’s not in the script… that’s not happening.’

“So the whole day I was like stressed out, I was like 'Oh my god, wait, am I gonna have to…' and it didn’t happen that day, but then the second day of Snow Ball.”

Sink and McLaughlin performed the kiss in a room full of extras as well as “their parents, and the crew and [Sink's] mom.”

Many are expressing their concern regarding the moment via social media wondering why the Duffers didn't work with the actors in order to make them feel comfortable in performing the moment.

It turns out that the director told the girl this as a joke. There was no kiss in the script. When they saw how upset she was, they decided it would be hilarious to actually do it.

Didn't care for Irreversible

I heard about the movie Irreversible being truly shocking. Yeah, it was shocking as movies go, but all the warning about how shocking it was may have blunted it. It was mostly boring. The camera going all over the place sure didn't help.

The film consists of thirteen scenes shown in reverse chronological order. Reportedly, the film was pitched this way to cash in on the popularity of Christopher Nolan's Memento.

Maybe film brutality doesn't affect me as much as it should. There was a girl in high school who babysat a couple of preschoolers who loved watching The Exorcist. They thought Linda Blair's head turning all the way around was hilarious. Maybe I'm like a preschooler. I had a friend who insisted on watching the same horror movie over and over and over. He wouldn't even look at the screen during the scary parts while I blandly watched. I knew it wasn't real.

On the other hand, I've always been horrified by the ending of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. 

Paul Genge, Bullitt

I wonder if this got him the role in Bullitt.

Watched an episode of Perry Mason last night. It had Paul Genge in it as a criminal. He goes into a hospital to get to an injured woman he tried to murder. Later, he tried to hijack a truck Paul Drake was driving and dies in a fiery car crash. All stuff he did  two years later in Bullitt.

Things like that happen. Janet Leigh thought she got the part in Psycho because of her motel scenes in A Touch of Evil. In Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Jodie Foster played an older version of essentially the same character she did in The Courtship of Eddie's Father but I don't know if that got her the part.

Ratzinger, Morley Safer

Pope Bendedict XVI poses with a couple of sex deviants and their victims.

Years ago, Morley Safer did a story on 60 Minutes about the Boys Choir of Harlem. Safer reported approvingly of the physical abuse the asshole who ran the choir inflicted on the boys. He thought it was funny that a kid with big ears said that the scumbag would twist his ears.

You think Safer would have been chuckling over Jewish kids treated this way?

Now there's a report out on a German Catholic music school where over 500 choir boys were abused over the years. Pope Benedict XVI's less successful brother, Georg Ratzinger, was choir director. He says he stopped slapping children after the Mother Church banned corporal punishment.

According to the New York Times:

In the remaining cases, 547 in total, the reports of abuse were deemed plausible, based on interviews or other corroborating evidence. Of those cases, 67 are believed to have involved sexual abuse. The others involved various forms of corporal punishment, including ear-twisting and beatings with a cane.

Sadism is a common enough impulse. There's an overlap between physical and sexual abuse.

For some, Father Ratzinger embodied a musical perfectionist who sought success above all else, while others recalled him as being quick with a slap, and having no compunction against throwing a chair or music stand into the choir.

Many recalled him picking favorites, which meant the best singers had no problems with him, while others were beaten or slapped for singing a wrong note.

When Mr. Weber started his investigation, Father Ratzinger was critical, calling it “insanity” to try to investigate how many slaps had been “doled out” in the institution associated with the choir. He did not have any immediate comment on the latest findings.

Yet it's those of us who aren't charmed and delighted by choir music who are denounced as cynical monsters. 

Joe Esteves, Rollergator (1996)

So, I watched some of the Rifftrax version of Rollergator. I thought that the standard definition digital video looked okay which made me feel better about buying an old Canon XL1 on eBay. According to imdb.com, the director, Donald Jackson, has directed 38 movies since 1976.

Here's a clip:

Now, about Joe Esteves. He's Martin Sheen's brother. He sounds just like him and I understand that he makes pretty good money doing voice-over work for TV commercials. When you see a commercial and it sounds like Martin Sheen, it may well be Joe Esteves. When things went wrong with Charlie Sheen, Joe offered to temporarily take his place on Two and a Half Men, not taking Charlie's role but just appearing so they'd still have the right number of men.

But what was he doing in this movie?

Over the years, John Carradine appeared in scores of low budget horror movies. Rory Calhoun did the same thing late in his career. Dustin Diamond's main thing is being the only recognizable actor in low budget comedies.

I heard a B movie director who had John Carradine play a mad scientist explain that it wasn't to have a big star in the movie. He didn't think people would rent his video because Carradine was in it. It was, he said, for the morale of the filmmaker. It made him feel like a real director to have a real actor he had seen in real movies acting out his script.

Even then---no offense to Joe Esteves---I don't think that's the case here. I've seen the guy in one or two things, but he didn't make that big an impression. John Carradine was in Stagecoach and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask.

In this age of digital video, when anyone can make a movie and actually have it look technically competent, what can you do to signify that what you've made is a real movie and not an amateur video? You can make it clear that at least one actor got paid.

I suppose an alternative would be to have actors do things they didn't want to do. Nude scenes, sex scenes, stunts---things they wouldn't do unless there was money involved.

Joe Esteves being in Rollergator did change my impression of the movie.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

I should have read the imdb.com entry first. They classified it as a "Comedy, Crime, Drama". I would never have taken it as a comedy.

A woman whose daughter was raped and murdered finds three unused billboards on the edge of town. She pays a surprisingly large amount to have three signs posted asking why there had been no arrests.

The characters all talked the same, all using the same obscenities over and over and over. Even when it made no sense. A man working in an office swears as he talks to a woman who walks in asking to lease the billboards. The parents swear at their children, the children at their parents. There was too much talk in general. Very little was non-verbal.

Written by an Irish guy whose major influences were David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino, which explains a lot. They should have gotten a Norwegian or a Slovak.

There was a lot of editing. There were no long takes. The story is mostly coincidence.

Filmed on high definition video on an Arri Alexa XT Plus.

It reminded me a little of In the Heat of the Night with what might be a well-meaning police chief saddled with officers who aren't very good. It also might make a good double feature with the 2014 Dutch movie Violet, another movie about a murder the characters are in no position to solve.

Even the "good" cops in this aren't that good. They let their "brother officers" get away with torture and assault. Getting fired is the worst penalty they face for their crimes.

Surprisingly violent. People are always getting beaten up, pistol whipped, kicked in the face, thrown out windows.

Munchausen, Germany, 1943

I watched Munchausen, (Nazi Germany, 1943). A lavish production, in color. The movie was commissioned by Goebbels to celebrate the anniversary of the movie studio. It was reportedly very popular in Germany, due perhaps in part to the surprising amount of nudity.



Based on the Adventures of Baron Munchausen, set in the 18th century. Munchausen is a German soldier who fights in the Russian army. A little surprising they made a movie about it since the Nazis were at war with the USSR. It was filmed during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad. Over a million Soviet people died in the siege, mostly from starvation---about the same number of people who died in the Armenian genocide---yet much of the action in this movie takes place in that city, then St Petersburg.

I never liked "tall tales". Munchausen rides a cannonball, he has a rifle that can shoot a hundred miles, he has a courier who can run hundreds of miles per hour and he rides to the moon in a hot air balloon. In the first or second grade they made us watch school movies about Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill and even back then, that kind of crap just left me cold. There's nothing remotely amusing about it.

I don't know if any actual Black people appeared in the movie, but there were white actors in blackface. Some of the action took place in the Ottoman Empire. Munchausen is enslaved but is offered a job by the Sultan if only he will convert to Islam. In a Nazi touch, Munchausen refuses. He has only one religion and one homeland just as he has only one mother.

There was a Soviet movie made years later about Baron Munchausen. Western academics interpreted it as being secretly anti-Communist. They interpret all Soviet movies this way always through some tortured logic. But they never see Nazi film this way. Why do you think that is?

Local hate groups clash

Neo Nazis vs Zionists with peace activists caught in the middle

I used to attend events where I was the only one with a camera. Now everyone takes pictures all the time everywhere and for no reason. I was at one event a few years ago. There was a conflict between an especially dull group of alt-right oldsters on one side and an odd alliance of anarchists and admirers of the Israeli state on the other. I was just there to see the protest, but, at my age, people would either think I was a Nazi or a Zionist and I don't want anyone suspecting for even for a second that I was either. But I was caught in a crossfire. Everyone had a camera and they were all taking pictures.

The group had been a pacifist discussion group on campus. They were anti-war in general, and, naturally, were highly critical of Israel. This made them the target of constant attacks by Zionists who, of course, made baseless accusations of anti-Semitism. This resulted in the group being driven from a couple of churches they used to meet at.

The head of the group was a retired professor named Orville who was able to get them classroom space for their meetings. Orville was nearly a hundred-years-old. In response to the continuing attacks on them by Israel-lovers, he made the unfortunate decision to change it from a pacifist group to a free speech group. They'd talk about anything.

All the false accusations of anti-Semitism had attracted actual anti-Semites to join. The new focus on free speech, the informal structure of the organization and its leader being way past his prime conspired to turn it into an alt-right discussion group. It came out that a woman in the group was acting as a caregiver for Orville. She was sleeping with a married neo-Nazi who was also a member, and that gave them undue influence over him.

This was revealed by another member of the group, a retired religious studies professor named Billy. He was old, white and American as you would imagine, but he had converted to Hinduism. But he was no George Harrison or Shirley MacLaine. He was a right-wing Hindu and had enthusiastically adopted the Hindu tendency of morbid, violent hatred for Muslims.

The group disbanded when the founder died. Three of them announced that they were forming a new group to focus on hating Muslims and they were never heard from again.

One was an impoverished retiree who never had a real job. He lived on Social Security and had self-published a book he copied and pasted together. The book was anti-Muslim. He was Jewish but was a Holocaust denier. Another was a Lithuanian immigrant. He claimed he was kicked out of the Soviet Union when they found out he worked for the CIA. Seems like they would have arrested him. He's now a "white separatist". I don't know what's keeping him going back to Lithuania which is nearly all-white.

And the other was Billy, the Hindu convert. A quick Google search revealed that he was written up in a book called Re-Framers: 170 Eccentric, Visionary and Patriotic Proposals to Rewrite the U.S. Constitution. He has proposed 100 amendments to the constitution, including one to legalize racial profiling, especially of Muslims, and one to criminalize homosexuality.

Turns out adults have terrible taste

I saw my first R-rated movie when I was twelve. That was when HBO--then called Home Box Office--came into being. I was shocked. I was shocked that R-rated movies were so stupid. I tried to picture the sort of moronic grown-ups who would pay to see Death Race 2000 or Rollerball.

When I was six or seven, an idiotic-looking horror movie was being advertised called Frogs, rated R. I asked my brother how a movie like this could do any business. What adult would go to a thing like this? It's a little strange that I thought in those terms.

The first R-rated movie I saw may have been The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. I was babysitting and watched the people's HBO. A guy named Peter Proud realizes that he's the reincarnation of his girlfriend's father, so his girlfriend's mother, who murdered him in his past life, kills him again, this time for sleeping with his own daughter.

I guess it raised the philosophical question of what difference would it make if we WERE reincarnated since no one remembers their past lives anyway. So what if a guy was Hitler in his past life? He's not Hitler now. And if you kill him, won't Hitler just be reincarnated again?

I was glad when VCRs took over. We had gotten rid of HBO years earlier because it wasn't very good, but I felt left out. There was a local video store that specialized in foreign and high brow cinema. I started going there all the time. They were the type of movies I had imagined adults watching.

Perry Mason, Crispen Glover's father, Bruce

I was sitting here watching Perry Mason again. It was "The Case of the Golden Girls" based on Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Vagabond Virgin. I was surprised they would put that title on the screen. The opening shot of one scene was a close-up of a young woman's butt as she walks away from the camera wearing a daring two-piece swimsuit. I don't think they would do that on TV today.

The episode revolves around a Playboy-like magazine.

You know that episode of Gilligan's Island where the rock band called The Mosquitos are on the island and Mrs Howell, Ginger and Mary Ann form a girl band and sing a song called "You Need Us"? Well, the instrumental version of that song is playing in the Playboy Club-like club when police come in to arrest Perry's client.

"That's weird," I thought. "That guy looks and sounds like Crispin Glover."

I looked it up on imdb.com. It was Bruce Glover, Crispin's father. I realized I recognized him from other movies and TV shows. He was in Diamonds Are Forever. But he didn't seem so Crispen Glover-like on other roles.

Seems to be a remake of an earlier episode.

Here's a trick for you: If you have to pay a blackmailer, pay by check. And carefully trace your own signature onto the check then call the banks and tell them that someone has been forging your name on checks. Then, when the blackmailer goes to cash your check with an obviously traced signature, he'll be arrested. His only defense from a forgery charge will be to admit he was blackmailing you. So you blackmail him by holding the forgery charge over his head.

Angel Unchained (1970)

A PG rated biker film from the '70's. I saw it at a drive-in when I was eleven. It was a double feature with a British comedy my sister wanted to see for some reason. They both seemed terrible to me even back then.

Angel Unchained was about a biker called "Angel" who quits his motorcycle gang and joins a hippie commune.

There was no actual nudity, but in one scene, a hippie woman takes her shirt off in front of him. She says, "What are you looking at?" Angel says "Scenery." She either said something about free love or women not being sex objects. I don't remember. I just watched the end of the movie on TV and I missed that scene.

Slower and duller that I remembered.

Local rednecks threaten the commune and Angel gets his gang to defend them. Even as a fifth grader, I thought the final battle---motorcycles vs rednecks in dune buggies---was absurd. Since when were dune buggies the rednecks' vehicle of choice?

I guess it was good that the movie presented bikers as violent morons unfit to live in a civilized world.

With Tyne Daly, Don Stroud and Aldo Ray among many others.

On the Beach (1959). We're all doomed

NATO is massing troops on the Russian border. American voters elected Trump who promised to improve relations with Russia, but that was a lie like everything else he said. Clinton lost in large part because her one and only campaign promise was to bring the US into direct warfare with Russia.

There was the movie On the Beach (1959), Stanley Kramer's big budget post nuclear holocaust movie, with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Tony Perkins, Fred Astaire. Nuclear war has destroyed the Northern Hemisphere. A radioactive cloud is spreading over the Earth. In Australia, people wait for it to reach them. The government distributes suicide pills.

At one point, there's an auto race. The drivers know they're doomed anyway and there's one wreck after another. The winner is the one driver who managed to survive. He takes a victory lap. The track is empty except for wrecked cars.

And now we have a country run by people, both Republicans and Democrats, who are actually pushing for World War Three. They know that global warming will kill us all. Climate change is happening faster than we thought. Donald Trump denies it but he's building walls around his golf courses to guard against rising sea levels. Maybe they think nuclear winter will solve the global warming problem, or they want to die on their own terms and take the rest of the world with them.