ROMAN POLANKI'S Macbeth (by william shakespeare)

Christopher Hitchens made fun of Polanski for having his name above the title and Shakespeare's name below it. I guess that was Polanski's decision.

But the movie really was Polanski's thing. After a pre-title scene, the first shot of the movie is of an actor who looks just like Charles Manson. He uses a mace to brutally murder a dying soldier after a battle. Polanski modeled the scene of the McDuffs being massacred in their castle after the time the Nazis ransacked his family's apartment. When someone suggested less blood, Polanski reportedly said "I know violence. You should've seen my house last summer" (when his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered.)

I've seen other versions of Macbeth and this movie was way more Polanski than Shakespeare. Gives credence to the auteur theory. I don't think Kurosawa gave Shakespeare a screen credit at all for Throne of Blood.

The actual Macbeth was supposedly one of my ancestors. Once they find a royal in your family tree, it's easy to trace you ancestry way, WAY back. They traced my family back to a couple of centuries before Christ. But who knows. Until recently, you could only know for sure who your mother was. It's hard to believe that, through all those centuries, not one lady ancestor had a boyfriend.

In a way, the movie was like Roger Corman's The St. Valentine's Day Massacre which had so much killing and machine gunning that, by the time they got to the Massacre itself, it was kind of a letdown.

There's so much blood in this movie, it's silly for Lady Macbeth to worry about one damned spot.

The movie was made for $3 million in 1971. That's still only $18 million in today's money. It would be considered a low budget movie today, at least in Hollywood. How did they get so much more for their money back then?

Beloved humanitarian punched in the face

This may be the first thing I've ever seen Lindsay Lohan in.

It was broadcast live on Instagram.

Apparently in Moscow, she approaches a family who she claims are Syrian refugees. Others thought they were Roma. She wants to take the children from the parents. They're sitting on the ground which she calls "the floor". She thinks that the family getting up and walking away from her is "child trafficking". She follows, haranguing and filming them as they try to get away.

“You’re ruining Arabic culture by doing this. You’re taking these children they want to go. I’m with you. Don’t worry, the whole world is seeing this right now, I will walk forever, I stay with you don’t worry.”

Finally the mother punches her in the face and she starts crying. “I’m like in shock right now, I’m just like so scared."

She lived in Dubai for a time. She uses a few word in Arabic and speaks in a phony accent.

Nietzsche on Kavanaugh

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

---Friedrich Nietzsche

 

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/friedrich_nietzsche_109786

Weird Kravanaugh news

No one's taking it seriously, but two men have claimed to be the ones who tried to rape Christine Ford at a party in high school, not the virgin Brett Kavanaugh.
 
I don't think they helped Kavanaugh. If anything, they showed what a nightmare of depravity their prep school was. They couldn't keep track of who tried raping whom.

It might be a good idea if you were really really desperate and had no dignity or self-respect. You could confess to a horrible crime that the statute of limitations had run out on and rest assured that a lot of Republicans would believe or pretend to believe you. You could probably get a book deal out of it. If not, you could self-publish on Kindle

But two guys had the same idea and ruined it for each other.

Ronan Farrow again

I don't know if this is a problem with the #MeToo movement or just Ronan Farrow, but he's done this twice so far that I know of----he's made accusations against Woody Allen and Brett Kavanaugh based on flimsy evidence and defended the attacks by saying that there's just as much evidence against them as in some of the #MeToo cases.

This is now his standard of evidence, at least against people he doesn't like. Ronan wouldn't use that reasoning on Mia Farrow. There's clear evidence that she's a child abuser and that she only targets the Asian kids. During the custody hearing, Farrow admitted in court that she assaulted Soon-Yi and there was testimony that she slapped Moses in the face because he couldn't find a dog leash.

There is some standard of proof in the #MeToo movement. We're still talking about Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein, but not about George Takei, Max Landis or Michael Douglas. In some cases, nothing more came of the allegations.

I would be happy to believe anything said against Kravanaugh. In the one accusation against him that Ronan has written about, if people of my ilk think Ronan Farrow's evidence is flimsy, think of how Republicans must feel. They're the ones who are going to vote that guy onto the Supreme Court. Ronan has jumped on the anti-Kravanaugh bandwagon but he may be sending it into a ditch.

Maybe Ronan Farrow isn't that smart after all

Ronan Farrow's record is mixed. He stunk on MSNBC. Soon-Yi Previn was seventeen when he was born and was off to college by the time might have had any memory of her, but he accused her of lying when she talked about abuse she suffered as a child. Same goes with Moses Farrow who was at least ten when Ronan was born. Ronan has no reliable memory of anything that happened before Moses was 15, but he called Moses a liar for talking about how he was treated as a child.

Ronan did some nice reporting on the #MeToo thing, but that may have been a fluke.

In the case of Brett Kavanaugh, Farrow's reported on a new allegation, that the virgin Kavanaugh exposed himself at a frat party.

“She was at first hesitant to speak publicly, partly because her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident. In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty....

After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away. Ramirez is now calling for the F.B.I. to investigate Kavanaugh’s role in the incident. ‘I would think an F.B.I. investigation would be warranted,’ she said.”

Farrow reports that none of the frat-boys at the party has corroborated the story. But...

 “Another classmate, Richard Oh, an emergency-room doctor in California, recalled overhearing, soon after the party, a female student tearfully recounting to another student an incident at a party involving a gag with a fake penis, followed by a male student exposing himself. Oh is not certain of the identity of the female student. . . .” 

The New York Times had looked into the story but didn't report on it because of the lack of corroboration. Farrow was interviewed on MSNBC and even they were skeptical.

It's been noted that the article itself acknowledges the weaknesses in the story.

I'm afraid of sounding like a "concern troll", but I hope that less convincing accusations won't dilute the stronger ones. We could end up with Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.

Cosby behind bars

 

Bill Cosby got 3 to 10 years. Being a registered sex offender doesn't seem like a big deal since everyone already knows what he did. He's legally blind which will be a serious impediment. But what celebrity skills could Cosby make use of in prison? He could blossom behind bars. Become a new man.  He's 81. He could easily have another fifteen years left for a bold new stage of life. He could work out in the prison gym. Get in shape. Work on his act. Prisoners must be starved for entertainment.

Michael Jackson might be alive today if he had gone to prison. He could have gotten a high school diploma. Anthony Weiner is getting therapy. Jim Bakker made ashtrays he sold to other inmates.

I don't know how he'd read them, but fans should write to him in prison. You could probably get a correspondence going. You'd have a better chance than people who join Twitter hoping to interact with celebrities. Phil Spector has a pen pal.

But, of course, it will be horrible. Nothing good about it, at least not for Cosby.

When I was a kid, we had a record of his I'd listen to. I liked the story of the chicken heart and remember the thing about Spanish Fly. On the album he talked about people who get mad at their dogs for barking and don't check to see what the problem is. So I check. I say, "What is it? What's bothering you?" the very words he used on the record. It hasn't done me any good so far, but Bill Cosby had a lifelong influence on me.

But I still don't understand the appeal of the old Bill Cosby Show. I remember watching some animated Fat Albert special on TV in the early '70's which gave me the idea that the later Saturday morning cartoon was really something, but I grew weary of it. I didn't like his personality on talk shows. Then he was promoting one his books on Donahue, something he may or may not have written himself, and told a "funny" story about spanking his son with a stick. Then the awful Cosby Show spawned a wave of discipline-oriented family sit-coms. He's ultimately to blame for Kirk Cameron. 

Every Single Film Stock Still Made Today Part One link

https://emulsive.org/reviews/film-reviews/film-list/every-single-film-stock-still-made-today-part-1-adox-to-dubblefilm

Bill Cosby to be sentenced tomorrow

It was sheer luck he didn't kill anyone.

The prosecution wants five to ten years, the defense wants house arrest.

It's like Alfred Hitchcock talking about suspense in the movies. If there's a scene with a time bomb under Hitler's table, the audience will find itself identifying with Hitler hoping they'll find the bomb in time. The situation is stronger than the character.

Reading about this, I worried about Bill Cosby. He's 81, legally blind. How can they send poor Bill Cosby to prison even if he is a dangerous monster?

But I realized that the second I hear what the sentence is, I'll quit caring. Unless it's outrageously light.

Time goes faster for old people. A ten year sentence would seem incredibly long to a teenager. Bill Cosby will be surprised at how quickly it's over. "It feels like I just got here!" If anything, he should get a LONGER sentence due to advanced age.

Salesman, cinema verite, 1968

Kind of depressing. We see traveling door-to-door salesmen trying to sell illustrated Bibles. They gets names through local Catholic churches. The Bibles are $40, around $280 in today's money. Amazing they sold any but it shows why they were okay making so few sales a day. But it sounds like some were making pretty good money.

Some were more high pressure than others. In their motel room, one mimics his mother talking about his more successful brother. None of them seemed very pleasant and they all seemed kind of pitiful.

Made by the Maysles Brothers in 1968.

The poor guys smoke cigarettes, they drive convertibles, they share motel rooms. We see in people's homes in the late '60's. One man in a wifebeater turns on the stereo. He plays a semi-classical instrumental version of the Beatles' "Yesterday" while his wife discusses terms of the sale.

They say in the commentary that Paul, the main focus of the film, died just a few years while the film was shown on TV for the first time.

On the commentary track, they talk about how people react to the cameras. Everyone seems natural. People don't seem to mind being filmed. Only one looks briefly at the camera. In one case, a woman walks in while they're filming---walks in unexpectedly and finds a camera crew in the living room and is completely at ease with it. It might because it was so alien to them. I don't know how people today would react. Having a camera pointed at you isn't much of a novelty anymore.

Filmed by two guys, two brothers. Filmed on Kodak Plus X black & white, 125 ASA in tungsten light.

Available on Filmstruck

Planes are loud

It's 6:17 AM. I have the window in my bedroom wide open. There's been a plane flying around out there for at least half an hour, just flying in a big circle. Now I hear a jet. I hope it's coming to shoot it down.

Kavanaugh from his days with Ken Starr

Ken Starr with Brett Kavanaugh

 As the GOP prepares to gut his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, let’s recall Brett Kavanaugh’s justification, when he worked for Ken Starr, for asking how many times Clinton ejaculated into Monica Lewinsky’s mouth…

I am strongly opposed to giving the President any "break" in the questioning regarding the details of the Lewinsky relationship -- unless before his questioning on Monday he either (i) resigns or (ii) confesses perjury and issues a public apology to you. I have tried hard to bend over backwards and to be fair to him and to think of all reasonable defenses to his pattern of behavior. In the end, I am convinced there really are none. The idea of going easy on him at the questioning is this abhorrent to me. 

From https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/21/roaming-charges-4/

Will Brett Kavanaugh molest Amy Chua's daughter?

Remember Amy Chua, the millionaire Yale law professor? She wrote a book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in which she bragged about abusing her daughters. She claimed this was raising children the "Chinese way".

Well, Chua enthusiastically endorsed Supreme Court nominee and would-be teen rapist Brett Kavanaugh as a "mentor to women". Yale provided Kavanaugh with law clerks. Chua played an "outsized role" in vetting the clerks who worked for Kavanaugh and Kavanaugh had an official role in vetting clerks for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Chua told female law students preparing to interview with Kavanaugh that they should dress like models and exude a "model-like" femininity. 

Chua's scumbag husband, Jed Rubenfeld, also an influential Yale law professor, told a female student that Kavanaugh liked a "certain look".

Rubenfeld told the student that she should send photos of herself to Chua so she could help her decide how to dress. Chua herself is known for her mini-skirts.

According to the Guardian, "Chua allegedly told the students that it was 'no accident' that Kavanaugh’s female clerks 'looked like models'. Student reacted with surprise, and quickly pointed out that Chua’s own daughter was due to clerk for Kavanaugh.

"A source said that Chua quickly responded, saying that her own daughter would not put up with any inappropriate behaviour." 

So Chua thought there was inappropriate behavior to put up with? And she thought her daughter, who she proudly trained to meekly endure years of abuse, wouldn't go along with it?

Chua emailed a statement to the Guardian: “For the more than 10 years I’ve known him, Judge Kavanaugh’s first and only litmus test in hiring has been excellence. He hires only the most qualified clerks, and they have been diverse as well as exceptionally talented and capable.

“There is good reason so many of them have gone on to supreme court clerkships; he only hires those who are extraordinarily qualified. As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, he has also been an exceptional mentor to his female clerks and a champion of their careers. Among my proudest moments as a parent was the day I learned our daughter would join those ranks.”

A Yale Law School official emailed a statement:  “This is the first we have heard claims that Professor Chua coached students to look ‘like models’. We will look into these claims promptly, taking into account the fact that Professor Chua is currently unreachable due to serious illness. If true, this advice is clearly unacceptable.”

Chua's husband, Rubenfeld, is already under investigation for something. In order to preserve his victims' anonymity, they wouldn't tell him what the charges were specifically. 

 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/20/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-yale-amy-chua

McGowan vs Argento

They reportedly got matching tattoos.

You know what they remind me of? They remind of other celebrities who've made fools of themselves becoming instant spokesmen. Roseanne Barr "recovered" "memories" of sex abuse and next thing you know she was testifying before Congress, accusing her family of horrible crimes that never happened. She now says was the biggest mistake of her life. Christopher Reeve became paralyzed, then testified before Congress calling for them to look for a cure. Disabled people were angered because they needed immediate government assistance to live their lives, something the millionaire Reeve didn't realize. A cure for paralysis that was decades away (he testified more than 20 years ago) wasn't their first priority. Angus T Jones, perhaps looking at what became of Charlie Sheen, found religion but unwisely let them make him their spokesman about a week after his conversion.

Rose McGowan was already in some sort of petty feud with Alyssa Milano and then attacked her for supporting the #MeToo movement. The two were co-stars playing witches on a TV show. "I don't like her. 'Cause I think she is a lie," McGowan told an interviewer. Can a person even be a lie?

Now that Argento has been accused of molesting a high school kid, Slate reports that "...Argento announced she was starting 'phase two of the #MeToo movement,' in which victims who have not 'led a blemish-less life' would be encouraged to tell their stories without fear of being discredited by their past misdeeds. It takes an enormous amount of self-regard to declare yourself the leader and inventor of a new phase of a social movement. It takes an even greater amount of disregard for other survivors of sexual violence to link that new phase to your own alleged history of abuse."

The article concludes:

...The A-list celebrities who came out against Weinstein kickstarted the #MeToo movement. In the long run, though, the health of the movement depends on the willingness of stars like McGowan and Argento to amplify the work and stories of women who don’t have the security of fame and riches—instead of using the momentum from that work and those stories to create career opportunities for themselves.

This week, McDonald’s workers in six cities went on strike to protest the company’s failure to take action on complaints of workplace sexual harassment. Organizers say it’s the first strike in more than a century to focus on this particular issue, and it’s one of the clearest and most convincing signs that the potential consequences of #MeToo could reach industries far removed from Hollywood. It was also the kind of action that could have benefited from high-profile publicity and pressure from, say, a celebrity who claims to command an entire #RoseArmy against sexual harassment. Instead, the entertainment press has stayed focused on the Argento-McGowan fight, which is veering further from the core issues of #MeToo every day.

A few quotes

“So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.”

– Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate


“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

– Noam Chomsky


“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin


“Let us wake up, humankind! We’re out of time. We must shake our conscience free of the rapacious capitalism, racism and patriarchy that will only assure our own self-destruction.”

– Berta Cáceres, Indigenous and environmental activist, murdered by a rightwing Honduran death squad.


I copied and pasted these from this article. 

How to save ourselves from climate change

We might also reflect that, climatically speaking, the best thing that can happen in the short term is a global economic depression. Carbon emissions in the U.S. dropped by 11% between 2007 and 2013, mostly because of the Great Recession. A deeper economic collapse would have an even more positive effect, quite apart from the contributions it would make to the sort of systemic breakdown that would facilitate radical change.

Chris Wright, "Three Cheers for the Decline of the Middle Class", counterpunch.com

A drop in the standard of living is the only thing that will save us. Work less, spend less, take it easy. Enjoy your free time and save the world from annihilation.

Soviet apartment, 1979.

Asia Argento says she's suing

I was wrong again. It looks like Asia Argento is going to do it.

She tweeted:

To @rosemcgowan. The 24hr deadline given to retract your recent false statements about me has now passed. I must inform you & @raindovemodel that I’ve instructed Mishcon de Reya to seek substantial damages for deception, fraud, coercion and libel. You will hear from them shortly.

— Asia Argento (@AsiaArgento) September 18, 2018

I don't know how I feel about it. I already turn against Rose McGowan. She acted stupid and thought she was being revolutionary. And I disapproved of Asia Argento's movie The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things because I was repulsed by the J.T. Leroy hoax. I don't like her tattoos or Anthony Bourdain's. So I guess I've cruelly turned on both of them.

Years ago, Roman Polanski sued Vanity Fair for libel. Just because someone is an admitted child rapist, it doesn't mean that you can't make false and defamatory statements that make his reputation ever so slightly worse. Polanski was somehow able to sue in a British court even though he can't step foot in that country without being arrested. Mia Farrow flew to Britain to testify on his behalf and Polanski actually won the lawsuit.

So, even if Argento victimized Jimmy Bennett in the manner Bennett described, maybe she can still sue people for saying stuff about it.

In Polanski's case, he sued Vanity Fair for reporting that he began hitting on women right after the Manson family murdered his wife, Sharon Tate.

Asia Argento threatening to sue Rose McGowan

Asia Argento is threatening to sue Rose McGowan for libel.

Asia Argento

✔@AsiaArgento

Dear @RoseMcGowan. It is with genuine regret that I am giving you 24 hours to retract and apologise for the horrendous lies made against me in your statement of August 27th. If you fail to address this libel I will have no option other than to take immediate legal action.

4:01 AM - Sep 17, 2018

This for repeating the charge that Argento had sex with teen actor Jimmy Bennett. Argento's still denying it, apparently. 

From McGowan's statement:

“Asia you were my friend,” McGowan said. “I loved you. You’ve spent and risked a lot to stand with the MeToo movement. I really hope you find your way through this process to rehabilitation and betterment. Anyone can be be better- I hope you can be, too. Do the right thing. Be honest. Be fair. Let justice stay its course. Be the person you wish Harvey could have been.”

I can't really see McGowan retracting her statement and it doesn't seem like suing her would be a good move for Argento, but what do I know.

Jimmy Bennett's ex-girlfriend

On top of this, People is reporting that, a few years ago, Jimmy Bennett's ex-girlfriend accused him of stalking among other things. He kept calling and texting her and knocking on her door. She was 18 and he was 19. She also accused him of sex with a minor when she was 17 and he was 18, a couple of high school seniors. The whole thing was dropped because neither one of them showed up for a scheduled hearing in court.

The accusations by Jimmy Bennett's ex-girlfriend have nothing to do with Argento sexually assaulting him. The accusations by Jimmy Bennett have nothing to do with Harvey Weinstein raping Asia Argento. But you see why victims keep quiet about these things?

Soon-Yi Previn

Soon-Yi Previn is under attack from Ronan and Dylan Farrow.

An interview with Soon-Yi appeared here:

http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/soon-yi-previn-speaks.html

Soon-Yi discusses the abuse she suffered at the hands of Mia Farrow, something Ronan and Dylan know nothing about. Ronan was four and Dylan was seven last time they saw her. Most of what Soon-Yi talks about happened before they were born.

You think there's a racial element to this? Mia Farrow's two favorite white children, Ronan and Dylan, are attacking Moses Farrow and Soon-Yi Previn, both adopted from Korea. 

Moses was the fourth child Mia Farrow adopted from east Asia. Of those four, at least three, Daisy, Soon-Yi and Moses, became completely estranged from her. We don't know what her relationship with Lark is like. 

Two of the children Farrow adopted later, Tam and Thaddeus, committed suicide.

Moses and Soon-Yi have told the same story. Ronan Farrow has nothing to say except what his mother drilled into him.

Even if Ronan realizes he's wrong, he won't change his tune. He's ambitious, he's parlayed this into a career and is making millions. He's too invested in it to change his story now. I don't know if Dylan Farrow really believes what she's saying, but she can't very well change her story either.

Hadley Freeman wrote in The Guardian:

Dylan Farrow, who has long accused Allen of sexually abusing her when she was seven (abuse Allen denies), excoriated the magazine for getting Allen’s friend, Daphne Merkin, to interview Previn and write “a one-sided piece”. But Dylan herself gave a one-sided interview about the alleged abuse in 2014 to the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, who is a friend of the Farrow family (the New York Times’ then public editor, Margaret Sullivan, wrote that she was “troubled” by the publishing of Kristof’s piece). Ronan Farrow, meanwhile, who has done such sterling work in the past year writing about sexual abusers, complained that the interview constituted “a hit job” that lacked “eyewitness testimony”. And yet the eyewitness here is Previn herself, and to a large degree what she says in this interview about what she describes as her physically and emotionally fraught childhood in the Farrow home echoes what her brother Moses, now a 40-year-old family therapist, wrote in a recent blog, which Mia Farrow has denied. So unless Ronan and Dylan Farrow want to make the argument that only their claims of abuse are worth listening to, not those of their siblings, then they’ll struggle to argue that people should not listen to Soon-Yi Previn. (The Guardian has contacted Mia Farrow’s representatives for a response to Previn’s allegations, but is yet to receive a reply.)

Outland (1981)

I saw this thing was available on Filmstruck. I wasn't interested in seeing it but I became intrigued by the thought of Peter Boyle in a science fiction movie.

The skin tight outfits they usually wear in science fiction movies always bothered me. They look uncomfortable and it means that most of us would look terrible in the future. They wore regular clothes in this movie and Sean Connery had a chubby kid (Nicholas Barnes) playing his tweenage son. But the gravity is so light there, they should all be fat and weak.

A remake of High Noon. They even had digital clocks telling us how long they have until the shuttle arrives. 

Peter Boyle is in charge of a mining operation on one of Jupiter's moons. Sean Connery arrives there as the new marshall. Workers keep losing their minds and dying in horrible ways. Connery discovers they're being given drugs to increase their productivity and this is a side-effect. Peter Boyle summons a gang of murderers to come to the moon and kill Connery. Connery tries to get people to help him shoot it out, but they don't want to get killed, too. His wife had the good sense to forsake him at the beginning of the movie. 

It annoyed me that Sean Connery and Peter Boyle talk pleasantly. Connery tells him he knows all about the drugs and Boyle tells him he'll have him murdered.

You know what Connery should have done to prepare for the final fight? He should have injected himself with some of the amphetamines they were giving the workers.

The final battle wasn't very interesting.

The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe (France, 1972)

Are there any French movies that don't make France look like a hellhole? I just watched The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe, a '70's French comedy.

A violinist becomes a pawn in a power struggle in the French intelligence service. The second in command creates a scandal in hopes of removing his chief of the organization so he can take his place. The chief's assistant randomly picks a violinist returning from a concert in Germany to be a decoy, convincing the second-in-command that he's an agent who will expose his plot to remove the chief. He's picked because his shoes don't match.

The French secret service, it turns out, is full of agents willing to murder one another in order to advance their immediate superior's career. And the chief is perfectly fine with the violinist being killed if it will help him keep his position.

The violinist Perrin (Pierre Richard) has no idea he's being watched. The agents aren't sure if he's a master spy or an idiot.

It was fairly successful in the United States. Today, it might be shown on a movie channel, but back then it was shown on commercial television. It was no art house film.  It was remade in 1984 with Tom Hanks. Foreign films had more mainstream success back then than they do now. I think dubbing played a role in it. There are a few other movies I can think of like Cousin Cousine (1975) and Small Change (1976) that were examples. They were shown both dubbed and subtitled on HBO back then and they were treated like any other movie.

With Bernard Blier, Jean Rochefort and Mireille Darc. Directed by Yves Robert.

Blame it on Rio (1984)

I'm sitting here with Stanley Donen's Blame It On Rio on TV. It's not as terrible as I remembered.

Michael Caine and Joe Bologna play a couple of friends working for a company in Brazil. They go to Rio de Janeiro on vacation with their teenage daughters. Bologna is in the middle of a divorce; Michael Caine's wife (Valerie Harper) leaves him while they're packing for the trip. In Rio, Bologna finds out that his daughter (Michelle Johnson) slept with a middle-aged man. He sets out to find out who it was not knowing that it was his best friend Caine.

Pauline Kael said the film was about incest in a disguised form. I don't quite agree with her, but it made me think about other movies. Like the 2013 movie Adore about two middle aged women who start sleeping with each other's college age son. Now THAT was a disguised incest movie.

It makes you wonder about Stanley Donen. He directed movies like Singin' in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Charade. Was this the sort of movie he REALLY wanted to make all those years or was he trying to keep up with the times?

It was probably Valerie Harper's biggest movie. With Demi Moore.

Modern Family's going to kill a significant character

They aren't saying who.

Rico Rodriguez's father died recently. It would be cruel to make him play a bereaved son.

They won't kill any of the children. What does "significant character" mean, anyway? Does it mean not one of the main cast? Jay's ex-wife (Shelley Long)? Phil's father (Fred Willard)?

Phil being devastated by his wife's death wouldn't be funny. Claire would cope better with Phil's death. Mitch and Cam seem mostly annoyed with each other so one of them dying would be kind of a relief.

Doesn't Luke do stupid things that might kill him?

This will be the 10th and last season of the show. Couldn't the death of a child devastate the family and cause its final disintegration? Would be an awfully grim ending.

They'll all so bourgeois. Phil must be an amazing realtor. It's been pointed out that the women on the show are all unemployed, but Claire's gone back to work. Cam somehow became a football coach, and Manny somehow became a football player.

But, if you want to help stop global warming, stop working so much. Quit buying so much. Consumer capitalism is destroying the planet. Value free time over material possessions.

The Soviet Union didn't have a glut of consumer products. People there lived in small apartments; rent was set at 10% of income. But they had six weeks vacation a year, they retired at 55, they worked about 30 hours a week and when they were at work, they didn't work very hard. If we all lived that way we wouldn't be in a period of mass extinction.

Film, video, schools

I have no idea what the economics of this are or anything about it at all, really, but, just as digital video has made movie cameras (the ones that use film) dirt cheap and digital SLRs have made once-expensive film cameras affordable, we ought to be able to open a few art house theaters using regular movie projectors and 35mm and 16mm film. It might cost more in the long run, but video projectors cost a fortune.

I haven't been to a movie in years, but don't 35mm and 16mm prints still exist?

Filmmakers are still shooting in 16 and 36mm for various reasons.

I remember being slightly surprised that schools switched to photocopiers and stopped using ditto machines (spirit duplicators, called a Banda machine in the UK or Roneo in Australia, France and South Africa). Now they just wheel TVs into classrooms instead of showing 16mm films.

I was just in on the earliest phase of this. In junior high school, you could pitch in a quarter and they'd rent a 16mm print of some movie they'd show in the library during lunch. The only ones I remember them showing were Bullitt and the old Casino Royale with Peter Sellers. I never watched any. They always collected the quarter (equal to $1.10 today) at the end of the week when I was out of money, so I'd sit around in the hallway annoyed that I couldn't use the library while they showed the movies.

A teacher taught a class called Star Trek. We would watch an episode the teacher recorded using the school's massive reel-to-reel Video Tape Recorder. The recordings were in black and white.

Another teacher's wife gave him a VCR for Christmas so he videotaped The Holocaust mini series and showed it in class. He said that if it was a copyright violation, they would sue the maker of the VCR, not him.

Then...then...it was high school.

Back then, there were hardly any movies available on VHS but an English teacher still taught a film class. We watched Battleship Potemkin on 16mm but almost everything else on video. We had to watch movies that had little place in film history, like The Lawman with Burt Lancaster (1971).

The Lawman was made around the time Hollywood discovered how to make people fly backward several feet when they got shot. We thought it was so much more realistic than the old days when people didn't fly backward. It looks stupid now.

It was a little like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. The Lawman's hobby was playing the flute.

A kid in class wasn't hip to the new, realistic westerns. He thought the Lawman should have shot the guns out of the bad guys' hands instead of killing them.

Then we all had to get permission to watch an R-rated movie. I was 18 and got to sign my own permission slip. It was a grimly serious class called Death & Dying about death in modern society. We watched The End with Burt Reynolds. Burt learns he has a fatal blood disease and decides to kill himself. He ends up in a mental hospital with Dom DeLuise.

Last I heard, and this was over 25 years ago, they watch movies in class all the time. They would end each segment with a movie sometimes vaguely related to the subject matter of the class. They would reward the children by showing them a movie, although video is everywhere now and it doesn't seem like much of a reward.

Try not to pity celebrities

It was on Saturday Night Live. A skit had Burt Reynolds on a talk show discussing his Oscar nomination for Boogie Nights. It ends with them asking him what he was going to do next with the newfound respect he had as a serious actor.

"Gonna make a car movie with Dom DeLuise," he said.

Burt noted in his memoir that he didn't manage his career well. He was having fun making movies with his friends and passed up challenging roles he should have taken. When he was ready to challenge himself as an actor, no one was interested anymore.

But the guy did fine. Another celebrity who lived a charmed life who we still feel sorry for.

Edgar Ulmer directed at least 56 movies, but his life was presented as tragedy because they were only B movies. Woody Allen directed 54 movies, but his career has been damaged by his opportunist son and idiot daughter. Woody's been making a movie or two a year since Bananas and is taking a bit of a break. According to IMDb.com, his next movie after Rainy Day in New York is scheduled for 2020.

According to the internet, Woody Allen's net worth is $80 million. He's 82. His father lived to be 101. He may have 19 years left. A few people have continued to direct movies when they were over 100 (which probably means it's not that hard). He could make a movie a year at $3 million each (which is how much Call Me By Your Name cost). Even if each movie was a total loss, he'd still have millions to leave Soon-yi and their daughters for them to fight for survival on a rapidly warming planet.

These guys are doing fine. Even if they want your pity, don't give it to them.

The Cruise, 1998

I remember seeing this thing reviewed on Siskel & Ebert. At the time, there was something about the video imagery of the city---to me, it gave it a feeling of realism you didn't get from film, like old movies where they used grainy black and white film to give it a newsreel look. But now that I'm finally watching the movie twenty years later, it doesn't seem that way at all. It looks pretty good considering it was filmed on standard definition video.

Filmed on one of these.

The Cruise is a 1998 documentary about an eccentric New York City tour bus guide named Timothy Levitch. He's entertaining, but I'm not sure I'd want to be be around him for an extended period. Directed by Bennett Miller who went on to direct Capote and Moneyball.

It makes New York look pretty good, but I still can't understand people wanting to live there.

Available on Fandor.

Moonves out at CBS

Les Moonves is kaput. He's leaving CBS.

A dozen women have accused Moonves of sexually assaulting them.

CBS says it will donate $20 million to organizations supporting the #MeToo movement. The money will come out of Moonves' severance package, but the severance package could be up to $100 million, so the serial rapist will never miss it.

Moonves' great uncle, Israeli prime minister David  Ben Gurion (née Dave Gruen)

Come on. Loosen up. Swing, man.

The Longest Yard, Burt Reynolds, 1974

I don't like sports movies or prison movies but, in honor of Burt Reynolds I watched The Longest Yard. Just a few years after Green Acres, Eddie Albert played the sadistic warden.

Was sorry they destroyed a lovely Citroen SM to make the movie, although the cars were still in production at the time. Citroen could make one extra to make up for it. Burt Reynolds plays an ex-football player turned gigolo who gets into a physical fight with his lady friend and speeds off in her car. He gets into a high speed chase with police, laughs as he causes car wrecks and nearly runs down a number of pedestrians. He assaults the officers who arrest him in a bar and goes to prison. The warden runs a semi-pro team made up of prison guards. He forced Burt Reynolds to put together a team of prison inmates for a game.

Perhaps a rip-off of a 1962 Hungarian film about Ukrainian POWs playing a game against Nazi prison guards. The movie has been remade several times.

I saw it back in the '70's. It was more grim than I remembered. Has a horrible murder, has guards abusing inmates, murderers injuring guards on the football field.

I always relate it to the much more pleasant Semi-Tough made a few years later. It's nothing like The Longest Yard except for Burt Reynolds playing a football player.

Whatever you do, don't go to prison in the South. Europeans consider US prison conditions medieval. I've seen prison documentaries from Russia and they seem pretty nice over there. There was a Norwegian crime movie a couple of years ago with Serbian gangsters. "Have you ever been in prison here? Everybody's nice!"

This was filmed in the state prison in Georgia with Jimmy Carter's cooperation. Reportedly, filming was delayed a couple of times due to prison uprisings.

Why you don't want alcoholic police women

Was she drunk? Because this is a common thing with drunks. They walk into the wrong house or the wrong apartment and become enraged that someone changed their furniture and redecorated. I knew an alcoholic who did this and Charles Bukowski did it in an autobiographical novel. It happened in the Soviet romantic holiday comedy, The Irony of Fate.

So an unidentified (white) Dallas police woman forced her way into an apartment that wasn't hers and, naturally, murdered the Black man who lived there.

Another disturbing dream

I dreamed I went to see a doctor. Everyone in the office was really really nice to me. It seemed strange. It slowly dawned on me that I had mistakenly made an appointment with a pediatrician and they thought I was a really unhealthy-looking teenager.

Dinesh D'Souza's Death of a Nation

When I was in high school, I went to see Monty Python's Life of Brian. I didn't find it funny at the time. I knew people who loved it and I said, "But it wasn't funny", and they explained that they liked it because they kept picturing how elderly religious people would react to it. There was a kid who lived with his grandparents. He told me he decorated his room with posters from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade just to alarm them.

I just read a review of a Dinesh D'Souza "documentary". It has a zero percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It argues that Adolf Hitler and Josef Mengele were liberals and that Donald Trump is exactly like Abraham Lincoln. The movie was calculated to outrage people who will never see it, which means it was made only so right-wingers could chuckle over what they imagined Democrats' reaction would be.

The comments section confirmed it. There were long comments from Trump supporters. They didn't defend the movie's content or dispute the review. They just said that the bad review meant it had outraged a liberal and they were going to see it just to sock it to those Democrats.

Well, if that's how they want to spend their money....

D'Souza spoke at the university here a couple of decades ago. He then wrote something that appeared in the local paper. He said that the liberals had violated his right to free speech. No one had tried to stop him from speaking, there were no protests against his appearance, there was no heckling, but his rights were violated because, during the question-and-answer period, some people said they disagreed with him.

Gator, Burt Reynolds, 1976

It would normally be wrong to want Burt Reynolds to kill someone just because he laughed all the time and for no reason. But it was only Jerry Reed and he was playing a violent criminal.

I'd never seen Gator before. I decided to watch it when I found out it was a sequel to White Lightning. 

White Lightning had a similar problem with Burt Reynolds smiling as the police wrecked their cars. I didn't see Steve McQueen laughing when he ran the Dodge Charger off the road in Bullitt. Burt was trying to avenge his brother's horrible murder. You'd think he'd show greater seriousness of purpose.

Part of the charm of White Lightning was that pretty much every car was a Ford LTD. They had various makes and models in Gator.

The speedboat stuff in the swamp was disappointing. It was all at the beginning of the movie and was unrelated to the plot.

With Mike Douglas as the Governor of Georgia. With Lauren Hutton, Jack Weston and Alice Ghostley.

Gator is available on Amazon Prime.

Nightmare of juvenile delinquency

Frankie Lymon (right) with Little Richard.

I had heard about the song "I am not a Juvenile Delinquent" by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers but had never heard the song itself. They finally played it on the radio in a story on Lymon on NPR.

That night, I was haunted by a strange dream. I was a juvenile delinquent in a juvenile detention facility. I was wondering how long I was incarcerated for when a girl handed me an article ripped from a magazine. It reported that juvenile delinquents were giving up the Ruger 10/22 rifle in favor of an inexpensive Chinese-made .22 caliber rifle. I didn't know delinquents were that much into rifles.

The clock radio went off. I woke up and listened to the news---a 15-year-old undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic had killed two classmates and wounded 25 others in his school cafeteria with a Ruger 10/22 rifle.

I figured the dream was from hearing that song and I had known some delinquents in high school who were very proud of their Ruger 10/22---it's the only way I knew what a Ruger 10/22 was. But I told people I had a weirdly prophetic dream.

I heard the song "I am not a Juvenile Delinquent" again a few days ago. That night, I dreamed I was in high school. There was a kid with behavioral problems. He was coaxed into signing a "behavioral contract" and the principal was trying to use it to force him to join the Army.

Burt Reynolds RIP

Burt Reynolds has died at 82.

When I was a kid, I wanted a big Ford LTD with no hubcaps like Burt Reynolds drove in White Lightning. I didn't realize it at the time, but my sister had a crush on him. She watched Dan August and enthused that he did his own stunts. She went to White Lightning, then went to it again with my brother, then we all went to see it at the drive-in. Later saw Fuzz at the drive-in. I'd still go to movies if there were drive-ins.

India decriminalizes homosexuality

 About ten years ago, I was on the internet chatting with a kid in India who had just had his 18th birthday. He was still in high school and asked---and the question was entirely academic---if he could now go to jail for having sex with his classmates. Would it now be statutory rape?

I told him he should ask his father. He was a lawyer. He would know.

He said, We are Indian, not American. If I asked him that, he would kill me.

I was kidding, but I made him think American teens openly converse about sex with their parents. I guess SOME do, but you could probably find a few in India, too. They have over a billion people.

He googled the sex laws of India. He was surprised to learn that gay sex was a crime in the country. It was just never an issue for him.

Well, the Indian Supreme Court has voted unanimously to overturn the law against homosexuality. (Overturning state sodomy laws was a 5 to 4 decision in the US Supreme Court.)

“Criminalising carnal intercourse under section 377 Indian penal code is irrational, indefensible and manifestly arbitrary,” Chief Justice, Dipak Misra, wrote in his decision.

In a country of over a billion people, homosexuality should be encouraged.

Trump's evil tempered by stupidity

There was an editorial in the New York Times by an anonymous White House staffer who claims to be actively undermining the president. Some of it's good, some bad.

The guy claims that Trump is "amoral" because he's trying to improve relations with Russia and North Korea. Trump, like Obama and Bush, was the peace candidate. It's is probably why they won. Bush lost the popular vote because his criminal convictions for drunk driving were exposed just before the election (he was winning before that). Trump lost the popular vote because he was the worst candidate imaginable and a horrible borderline human being.

Trump campaigned on improving relations with Russia. And, no, Putin is not a "dictator", no more than Yeltsin was and the U.S. loved that guy.

On the other hand, Trump ordered that plans be made for an attack on North Korea and wanted a massive attack on Syria (Hillary Clinton's only campaign promise). Thank God his staff refused.

Decades after the Nuremberg Trials, people still use the "I Was Only Following Orders" defense. I just had some alleged liberals use that to defend John McCain's war crimes. But it turns out that the president himself can directly order you to do something and, even if it's your job, nobody's holding a gun to your head.

The Drowning Pool,1975

I don't know why they made these movies so comedic, but I watched The Drowning Pool, the sequel to Harper. I'd seen it before over the years. I read the novel by Ross Macdonald and thought it was brilliant. I read the other books in the series after that.

In the movie, private eye Lew Harper flies to Louisiana to help an old girlfriend, Joanne Woodward, who is afraid an ex-chauffeur (Andy Robinson) will tell her wealthy mother-in-law that she's been unfaithful to her closeted gay husband. She has a bratty, slutty teen daughter (Melanie Griffith).

The mother-in-law has a deranged oilman (Murray Hamilton) after her. He wants to take over the land she's set aside as a nature preserve.

The old woman is murdered. The story becomes complicated. The chauffeur is a swinger, the oilman had hired him to gather blackmail material, there are two murders, the police chief has an inordinate interest in the family.

The climactic ending was something Ross Macdonald thought marred the novel but it was good in the movie. The private eye and the oilman's wife are locked overnight in a hydrotherapy room in a shuttered mental hospital. They're going to be murdered if they can't escape, so they plug the drains and turn on the water full blast. As the water level rises, they can eventually reach the skylight.

The movie was made in the wake of Chinatown and they moved the story to Louisiana to avoid comparisons to that movie. Paul Newman's acting was more subdued than in Harper.

It seemed strange that Lew Harper would use a fake southern accent to fool southerners. At least he didn't use a Cajun accent on a Cajun bartender.

Available on Filmstruck.

For a second feature, I'd suggest Night Moves, a private eye movie made the same year also with a young Melanie Griffith. LA private detective Gene Hackman goes to the Florida Keys to find a runaway girl.

CNN pulls some Anthony Bourdain episodes

I've never seen Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. I don't know what it's about. Comedian Andy Kindler called for CNN to stop airing the series. "..I know it's sad, but stop running Anthony Bourdain's show PLEASE. I know the ending. Life isn't worth living."

Now they're pulling episodes in which Asia Argento appeared. Variety reports:

Argento, who was dating the show’s host Anthony Bourdain at the time of his death, appeared in two episodes of the series and directed a third. 

A CNN spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News that all three episodes were removed from CNN’s streaming service, CNN Go, due to the allegations against Argento. 

“In light of the recent news reports about Asia Argento, CNN will discontinue airing past episodes of Parts Unknown that included her, until further notice,” the spokesperson told BuzzFeed. 

Argento had reportedly paid off actor Jimmy Bennett, who claims Argento assaulted him when he was 17 and she was 37. As a child actor, Bennett played the son of Argento’s character in the movie “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” which Argento also directed. The New York Times published an expose claiming Argento reached a $380,000 settlement with Bennett last year, months after Argento came forward with rape allegations against Harvey Weinstein.

 

Harper, 1966

Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer detective novels had an intensity. The mysteries often went back decades, but the book only covered a day or two during which the private eye worked into the night to solve the case.

For the movie, they changed the name from Lew Archer to Lew Harper because Paul Newman had a thing for characters whose names started with an H. And they made him more of a wise-cracking Philip Marlowe type. Paul Newman overacted, mostly trying to be funny. He should have played it straight.

Detective Lew Harper is hired to find Sampson, a rich guy who flew to Los Angeles with his pilot (Robert Wagner) in a private plane, arrived drunk and disappeared. It turns out he's being held for ransom and Harper investigates the seedy characters the missing man likes to hang out with. With Robert Webber as a sophisticated psychopath, Shelley Winters as his aging starlet wife. Strother Martin as a religious nut who runs a mountaintop temple to the sun god. 

Laren Bacall as the missing man's wife, Pamela Tiffin as his daughter. And in a subplot that serves no purpose, Janet Leigh as Lew Harper's estranged wife.  

There was a sequel, The Drowning Pool, made a few years later.

Both are available now on Filmstruck.

Neil Simon, RIP

Neil Simon died Sunday at age 91.

I looked over his filmography on imdb.com and was a little surprised at how much of his work I had seen. I was also surprised that they included the Saturday morning cartoon The Oddball Couple about a dog named Fleabag and cat named Spiffy who live together.