George Bush

Unretouched photo of George Bush as he groped a high school girl.

My mother asked me if there were any US presidents in my life time who I liked. I said, well, were there any who killed fewer than a million people? I guess there was Ford.

Serial sex offender George HW Bush has died at 94.

I don't know how many people that guy killed between the invasion of Panama and the war with Iraq. As vice president, he went before the UN and lied through his teeth about the US shooting down an Iranian airliner full of people. In any situation like this where the US says one thing and another country says something else, the US government is lying. The US is powerful enough that it can say anything it wants and much of the world will pretend to believe it. Other countries have to at least have the truth on their side.

I don't know how much we should blame him for the millions who died under the Reagan regime, victims of death squads, the war in Afghanistan that Carter engineered, bombings, invasions.

Bush groping actress Heather Lind. He told her his favorite
magician was "David Cop-a-feel".

The Lonely Lady (1983)

You know what bad movie I'd like to see again? The Lonely Lady. I remember laughing at the scene in the beginning where Pia Zadaora receives her award at "The Award Presentation Show" and bitterly tells the worldwide audience, "I don't suppose I'm the only one who's had to f**k her way to the top!"

For some reason the scene I want to see was in the movie within a movie---screenwriter Pia's relationship with her screenwriter husband becomes strained when she proves to be a better writer than him. And he realizes she's a better writer when she has a character scream "WHY? WHY?" at her child's funeral. They show the scene being filmed. The actress looks one direction and yells WHY? She looks the other direction and yells WHY? And she does it with so little feeling that, had I been at that funeral, I would have instantly realized that she murdered her own child and was trying to cover it up with an emotional display she couldn't pull off convincingly because she was a psychopath.

I searched for it on Roku and nothing came up. There are three or four movies called Lonely Boy, but no Lonely Lady. Netflix doesn't have it on DVD, either.

It's available on Blu-ray from Amazon for $20. Used isn't much cheaper. Ebay is about the same.

I don't want to see it THAT bad.

And...it's gone

Had the TV on all night. I watched an Italian movie, a sequel to Nobody's Children, I slept through much of it. I watched Nobody's Children itself next, fell asleep, but I was awake when it suddenly stopped. It was 6:25 AM. That thing came on the screen that said "Loading", but it wasn't loading. Nothing was happening.

Filmstruck was kaput.

I was there to witness its final moment.

Article on Les Moonves in the NY Times

Les Moonves.

The Les Moonves #MeToo scandal is in the news again.

Moonves is the great nephew of Israel's first prime minster David Ben Gurion (real name Dave Gruen) and was head of CBS. And is a serial rapist.

It seems that Moonves and an agent named Marv Dauer were trying to cover up Moonves' rape of a young actress, one of Dauer's clients. If it can be shown that Moonves failed to fully cooperate with CBS's investigation of the accusations against him, Moonves would lose his $120 million severance package. And, it turns out that Moonves deleted text messages to Dauer dealing with the rape and cover-up. Hopefully, that will cost him the 120 million.

Moonves' Uncle Dave, founder of Israel.

Filmstruck

Know what movie this is from?

Tomorrow's the last day for Filmstruck. They said it shuts down tomorrow. I assume that means we'll have tomorrow left.

I'm sorry for what I said. I will subscribe to whatever replaces it even if Steven Spielberg plays some role.

Netflix is just crap now, but there's still Fandor.

Yes, good ol' Fandor.

The Jazz Singer (1927)

The first feature length film with both recorded synchronized music and some synchronized dialog. Most of the synchronized sound was singing and some of that wasn't synchronized very well.

I watched the Criterion restored version and it wasn't that bad. It was fast-moving anyway.

The songs and the singing were truly awful. I imagine the songs were 1920's popular music but it wasn't recognizable as jazz.

It was mostly a regular silent movie with intertitles. It was Al Jolson's recorded banter with his mother in one scene that made it interesting to audiences. There had been sound films before, but this was the first where you felt you were listening in on something.

Jolson kept kissing his mother on the lips which may have been normal back then.

Al Jolson performing in blackface came as he was talking about the music of his race---his character was  Jewish, trained to be a cantor, and he was still torn between that and singing what he thought was jazz. It symbolized that conflict and might not have been completely mindless racism. In Moe Howard's memoir, he mentioned performing in blackface on stage at the same time he was outraged by racism he saw in the South.

Some of the documentary-like footage of the Jewish ghetto in New York was interesting.

Other examples of early sound cinema:

The Japanese combined film and Kabuki theatre. In the 1890s, they would perform the indoor scenes on stage and the outdoor scenes on film with the actors standing behind the screen saying their lines as the film played, dubbing their own dialog.

In Syria, when they had only heard of talking pictures, they showed a movie with actors in the projection booth speaking into microphones loosely dubbing their lines.

Bernardo Bertolucci, 77, RIP

Bernardo Bertolucci has died. He was 77.

I vaguely remember my sister having gone to Last Tango In Paris, I guess in 1973. She complained that there were people giggling in the audience, failing to appreciate the film's seriousness of purpose. I went to it as few years later when I was in high school and they were showing it at the university. I ran into someone I knew on my way there, told him where I was going. He smirked and said something about butter, and then I sat in the crowded classroom they were using as a theater next to a group of giggling Asian foreign students. I don't know what they were laughing about. Could have been anything.

My sister is now an avid admirer of Steven Spielberg. I can't imagine her watching anything foreign unless it was British, and even then. I don't know who the girls at the movie were, but they must be pushing 60 now. And that guy I ran into---I think he's married and has a couple of children and, last I heard, his elderly mother was annoyed at him because he visits her regularly.

I loved The Last Emperor, about the last emperor of China who finally achieves happiness after the Communist revolution.

Wild 90, Norman Mailer, 1968

I didn't make it to the end of this thing. Didn't make it to halfway point even. I  only saw Norman Mailer, Buzz Farbar and Mickey Knox, but I see on imdb.com that there's a larger cast. Maybe it really took off after I turned it off.

For some reason Norman Mailer was credited as director and cinema verite filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker was listed as writer.

Reportedly, Norman Mailer and his friends had fun hanging around in bars pretending to be in the Mafia. Mailer thought it would make a terrific movie. So he called up Pennebaker. They went into a loft Pennebaker rented for some reason but wasn't using. They sat around improvising.

The results were awful. It could really use subtitles. The sound was terrible.

In this age of video cameras everywhere, when anybody in theory could make a movie, this should either be a great inspiration or deeply depressing.

You don't have a video camera and a couple of friends who could sit around either pretending to be criminals or playing slightly fictionalized versions of themselves for an hour and a half (it was called "Wild 90" because it was ninety minutes long)?

And this thing was part of the Criterion Collection. I wanted to see it before Filmstruck goes kaput on the 29th.

Cost $1,500 in 1967 (about $11,000 today.) But now it could be done for the cost of charging your camcorder battery.

"A Day with the Boys" (1969)

A short silent film made in 1969. Boys running and playing, doing stuff adults find cute and charming about pre-adolescent boys. I was never like that. I never had that much energy. I liked eating and watching TV way too much. And that would have been a good thing. The movie was cute but with a shock ending. The kids do something terrible then go skinny dipping.

Available on Filmstruck until they shut down in a week but it's part of the Criterion Collection and will be available somewhere.

18 minutes.

Directed by Clu Gulager. Cinematography by Laszlo Kovaks.

Suddenly (1954)

I showed my mother another movie featuring her old nemesis, the theater student who sexually harassed her around 1950 and went on to enjoy modest success in Hollywood.

We watched Suddenly (1954). The guy had a supporting role as a cop who shoots it out with one of the criminals.

It starred Frank Sinatra as a deranged war veteran who, with a couple of accomplices, takes a woman hostage along with her son and father-in-law. Their house overlooks the train station where the President of the United States will soon be stopping.

They never explain who hired him. Frank Sinatra himself says that the vice president will take over and nothing will change. It seems pointless to him, but someone was paying him to do it, so okay.

The only logical explanation is the vice president (then Richard Nixon) or maybe the president's wife (Mamie Eisenhower) put out the hit on the Chief Executive. A more interesting plot would be if the Secretary of Transportation plotted the simultaneous murders of the president, vice president and the dozen others ahead of him in line of succession between him and the Oval Office.

I was in high school when Reagan was shot. A lot of kids were happy about it or at least amused by it. I think I was skipping classes that afternoon and missed the announcement. I didn't see the teachers telling the kids that there were people happy about Kennedy getting shot, too, and they later felt bad for not concealing their glee.

I was indifferent. Reagan was a horrible person. I don't know how many people he ultimately killed, but I saw no advantage to having George Bush take over. I was far more radical than any of my classmates, but that may be why I didn't see it as a good thing. The only real effect of Reagan being shot was the gutting of the insanity defense.

I walked into school after being off somewhere. I was in a good mood about something else and didn't even know about the shooting, and someone accused me of being happy about it.

Tying it together with current events, I don't want Trump impeached. At least there's resistance to him. If Pence takes over, the Democrats will have gotten what they wanted and feel obliged to compromise with him.

TV is good again

I got rid of cable and I'm actually enjoying television again. With Comcast, we had about 2,000 channels mostly of pure crap. You could wade through thousands of channels and find nothing. I kept trying to watch Murder, She Wrote but never made it to the end of a single episode.

I'm thinking I should get rid of Netflix. Their streaming video is mostly crap and I could probably just buy the few DVD's I want cheaper than paying them.

One thing I didn't know until very recently is that they don't show cartoons on Saturday morning anymore. Someone told me it had been over 20 years. It's been that long since I've turned on a TV on Saturday morning. Lately on weekends I've been watching old episodes of Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot. Johnny Sokko is a little Japanese kid with a gun who commands a giant flying robot through his watch.

Film Israel doesn't want you to see

Here they are. You can watch a four part series Al Jazeera produced but, under pressure from the Israelis, never broadcast in English.

https://electronicintifada.net/content/watch-film-israel-lobby-didnt-want-you-see/25876

https://electronicintifada.net/content/watch-final-episodes-al-jazeera-film-us-israel-lobby/25896


From the article:

As revealed in a clip published by The Electronic Intifada earlier this week, the film shows Julia Reifkind – then an Israeli embassy employee – describing her typical work day as “mainly gathering intel, reporting back to Israel … to report back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.”

She discusses the Israeli government “giving our support” to front groups “in that behind-the-scenes way.”

Reifkind also admits to using fake Facebook profiles to infiltrate the circles of Palestine solidarity activists on campus.

The film also reveals that US-based groups coordinate their efforts directly with the Israeli government, particularly its Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

Run by a former military intelligence officer, the ministry is in charge of Israel’s global campaign of covert sabotage targeting the BDS movement.

The film shows footage of the very same ex-military intelligence officer, Sima Vaknin-Gil, claiming to have mapped Palestinian rights activism “globally. Not just the United States, not just campuses, but campuses and intersectionality and labor unions and churches.”

She promises to use this data for “offense activity” against Palestine activists.

Jacob Baime, executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, claims in the undercover footage that his organization uses “corporate level, enterprise-grade social media intelligence software” to gather lists of Palestine-related student events on campus, “generally within about 30 seconds or less” of them being posted online.

Baime also admits on hidden camera that his group “coordinates” with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

Baime states that his researchers “issue early warning alerts to our partners” – including

“With the anti-Israel people, what’s most effective, what we’ve found at least in the last year, is you do the opposition research, put up some anonymous website, and then put up targeted Facebook ads,” Baime explains in part three of the film.

“Canary Mission is a good example,” he states. “It’s psychological warfare.”

The film names, for the first time, convicted tax evader Adam Milstein as the multimillionaire funder and mastermind of Canary Mission – an anonymous smear site targeting student activists.

The Electronic Intifada revealed this in a clip in August.

Eric Gallagher, then fundraising director for The Israel Project, is seen in the undercover footage admitting that “Adam Milstein, he’s the guy who funds” Canary Mission.

Milstein also funds The Israel Project, Gallagher states.

Gallagher says that when he was working for AIPAC, Washington’s most powerful Israel lobby group, “I was literally emailing back and forth with [Adam Milstein] while he was in jail.”

Despite not replying to Al Jazeera’s request for comment, Milstein denied that he and his family foundation “are funders of Canary Mission” on the same day The Electronic Intifada published the clip.

Since then, Josh Nathan-Kazis of The Forward has identified several other groups in the US who fund Canary Mission.

Cheap props

Teen madman in lavender cardigan.

Went to the grocery store for a few things last night. The place was full of people shopping for Thanksgiving. At the end of an aisle in a back corner of the store, they had a selection of squirt guns. Some, strangely, were in the shape of hand grenades. They were a quarter each, so I bought a dollar's worth. I don't know what I'd use them for but with a coat of spray paint they'd make passable props. Maybe fill them with something to give them some heft.

Grenades played a role in two episodes of Dragnet, one where an angry teen outcast crashes a party and threatens the popular kids with one.

"They never invite me to their stupid parties! Turn on the music! Dance! Dance!"

In another, a Nazi throws a grenade at a night watchman while stealing a station wagon-load of dynamite he wants to blow up a school full of children because it's being desegregated.

Trying to put the pin back. "Give me a minute, Joe." "We may not have a minute."

Night of the Hunter (1955)

I've never gotten through this movie before. I've started watching it several times, but it's too disturbing and depressing. But my mother saw the link to it on Filmstruck and wanted to see it, so I sat through the whole thing. I kept starting to cry here and there, but I'm more prone to that than other people.

Two children watch their father arrested for bank robbery and murder. They're mocked by other children after he's executed. Then their father's psychopathic cell-mate, a phony preacher played by Robert Mitchum, comes around looking for the stolen money. The children know where it is, but they swore to their father that they would never tell.

It was the only movie directed by Charles Laughton. It was a commercial failure at the time but is now recognized as a great film.

There was an element of it that made me think of the French film L'Enfance Nue, about a disturbed boy in foster care. It starts with him in a bad foster home with uncaring parents who finally have to get rid of him. He's sent stay with an older couple who seem much warmer, a much better home. But, objectively, the first foster home was better. The father kept giving the kid money, for one thing. The older couple were actually abusive. The old woman smiles as she talks about how she cured another boy of bedwetting by pinning his wet underwear to the back of his coat and sending him to school that way. After the kid intentionally spills soup onto his new foster brother, they start hitting him with a wet towel. "Hit him in the face!" the woman yells.

Robert Mitchum is menacing and the kids sense how dangerous he is, but he acts like a much nicer guy than Lillian Gish who, in her first scene is swishing a switch through the air to threaten the kids. Later, she spanks the naked boy behind some bushes and you can see how hard she's hitting him. But she's the good one, the only adult who sees through Robert Mitchum.

Cowboy violence

From the Czechoslovakian western spoof Lemonade Joe.

I guess I was wrong.

I was always complaining about westerns, that the violence that should have been their redeeming feature was very dull in part because everyone the had the same guns---a Colt revolver and a Winchester rifle.

I just realized that Robert Culp had a different gun---a Smith & Wesson Schofield revolver, according to the internet---on the show Trackdown, and it made no difference whatsoever.

I just want a cowboy with a Luger and a submachine gun.

Malta's new priest

I don't know what to make of this. Malta's new parish priest rode in a Porsche pulled by children in a parade welcoming him there. I guess he didn't actually arrange the thing and it may not be as objectionable as some people think.

The kids should have dressed casually so it would look more like they were having fun. Dress shoes and white shirts seem impractical for the task and it could be a disaster if they went down hill. But there was a guy in the driver's seat who could hit the brakes.

Ernst Lubitsch, The Doll (Germany, 1919)

Bizarre, surreal comedy by Ernst Lubitsch. I don't think I've watched any of his movies before and this sort of thing doesn't really interest me, but I was surprised at how much I liked it.

A Baron wants his nephew to marry so the family won't die out. The nephew takes refuge in a monastery. The monks are going broke and suggest that he marry a life-like mechanical doll so they can collect the 300,000 franc dowery the Baron is offering.

The doll is modeled on the inventor's daughter. The apprentice damages the doll. While he repairs it, the inventor's actual daughter takes its place and marries the Baron's nephew.

It's a little like the episode of South Park where Cartman disguises himself as Butters' robot friend. Because dolls don't eat. he doesn't feed her and she wolfs down food when she can. When the nephew returns to the monastery with his bride, they decide to store her in the junk room. He uses her as a clothes rack at one point.

15-year-old Gerhard Ritterband as the apprentice was the best one in it.

They might save Filmstruck

 

There's talk of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese keeping Filmstruck going or creating a substitute for it.

I don't think I want it if Steven Spielberg has anything to do with it.

Luck

If a successful person tells you that "there's no such thing as luck", you can bet that they succeeded through sheer luck.

And if they tell you they were "just lucky", they're most likely concealing the shameful, monstrous things they did while clawing their way to the top.

Even if you succeeded entirely though hard work and ambition, why on earth would you deny the existence of luck? I'm talking about luck as random chance, not a supernatural force that makes good things happen. Although you have to admit, some people have better luck than others.

My family lived in Europe in the late '50's and early '60's. They took a trip to Italy and toured the Vatican. Back in those days, the Pope would walk around and give the tourists a thrill. This happened, and my mother lost track of my brother in the crowd. She was afraid he was being trampled. Then she saw an Italian holding him up to the Pope. "Ai! Papa! Qui!" And ever since then, my brother has lived a charmed life.

While he was in Italy being blessed by the Pope, I was a baby back in Germany left behind with the housekeeper and her husband who lost his arm in World War Two. He wouldn't eat fish because all they gave him was fish soup when he was prisoner of war in the Soviet Union. And I'm a failure.

When he was two years old, my other brother was briefly picked up and held by cowboy star Chill Wills when he appeared at a shopping mall and he's in kind of a middle ground between me and our other brother success-wise.

Art direction

I listened to an interview on Fresh Air with Sandi Tan, the director of the documentary Shirkers about the making of a movie that would have been called Shirkers if the film hadn't been stolen by the director.

Having already seen the movie, the thing that stood out to me was that she said that finally seeing the footage twenty years after it had been shot made her feel redeemed---that the film looked great, shot it primary colors. 

I read that, long ago, a film professor made a deal with Roger Corman. Corman would put up the money for him to make a movie with his students. Corman looked at the footage they shot, didn't like it and sent an art director to work with them. Even Roger Corman making an especially cheap movie realized the importance of art direction.

Something to bear in mind in this age when anybody can theoretically make some kind of a movie.

Two pictures that came up when I googled "art direction".

The Summer of '42

Made in 1971. It was big enough that it was satirized in Mad magazine. A 15-year-old boy sleeps with an attractive young war widow. I saw it on network TV back then.

The kids in The Summer of '42 are sort of homely. All they do is talk about sex all the time which is rather repulsive. And they do that thing they do in movies where they smile maniacally to indicate sexual excitement.

It's a true story, so I shouldn't judge the poor kids by the high standards we set for fictional characters.

After the movie came out, the author was contacted by the woman who had seduced him. She had been afraid all those years that she had traumatized him.

It stars Gary Grimes who, up until this movie appeared in Gunsmoke, The Brady Bunch and My Three Sons. His best friend is played by Jerry Houser who ended up married to Marcia Brady in The Brady Brides.

It seems strange that it would have this connection to The Brady Bunch, but Marcia and Jan both went on to play teen prostitutes, Maureen McCormick on the Streets of San Francisco and Eve Plumb in Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway.

It shows the advantage of being a kid actor---you can find yourself starring in a major motion picture with very little experience.

Available on Filmstruck for another two weeks.

The Majestic

The Majestic. It might have been a good movie if Jim Carrey's character had been a Communist, if the townspeople who lost their sons in World War Two kept saying, "Thank God for Russia. They did most of the fighting." And if they had re-opened the theater to show Soviet and pro-Soviet films.

As it was, I didn't care for it.

But my mother wants to see it again and again so I don't know how many times I've sat through it. It's anti-McCarthyite in a simplistic way. If only someone had thought to talk about the First Amendment to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee the way Jim Carrey did.

The voices of Rob and Carl Reiner are in the movie as studio executives. They're now neo-McCarthyites themselves. Rob Reiner is on the Advisory Board of a group calling itself The Committee to Investigate Russia. It must be serious if Meathead is leading them.

Carl Reiner is bit more modest. His latest tweet:

Happy to report that my eye doctor did a fine job which makes allows me to continue watching and enjoying seeing and sending tweets about all the daily goofs and gaffs in which our Russian colluded President has been involved.

How wildfires could slow down global warming

Cozy Soviet era apartment.

Celebrities' mansions are burning down in the California wildfires. If they want to do something to slow down global warming, they won't rebuild. You know how much energy it takes to keep those places air conditioned?

When Benny Hill was doing his TV show, he bought a flat near the studio. Contrast that with Al Gore who commutes by private jet between his three mansions and pays for it all with the money he made off his global warming movie.

Filmworker, Shirkers

Two documentaries on Netflix.

Filmworker is about Leon Vitali, an actor who became the devoted assistant to Stanley Kubrick. He had played Barry Lyndon's battered, abused stepson. He became completely devoted to Kubrick. That was his life after that, doing whatever Stanley Kubrick wanted. Kubrick only made three movies after Barry Lyndon.

I thought Paths of Glory and Dr Strangelove were great and I liked his second feature, Killer's Kiss (1955). I found his other movies disappointing. His perfectionism was unnecessary, a waste of time and resources. It severely limited his output and his movies were known for being emotionally dead. And it turns out he was a horrible person.

Shirkers is about three girls from Singapore who make an independent  film in the early '90's. They had somehow become followers of a charismatic film guy who claimed to have worked on Apocalypse Now among other things. He directs a script one of the girls wrote. The girls' relatives, friends and strangers appear in the film. Their fourteen-year-old production assistant defiantly chews gum, illegal in Singapore, while slating scenes. At one point, the girls drove around Singapore going from ATM to ATM, emptying their bank accounts to finish the film. Then the "director" absconds with it. They realized they had never seen any of the footage they shot. We know it it exists because they show it throughout the documentary, but one of them remembers a moment when the camera fell open during a scene and there was no film in it. They're not sure they filmed anything at all.

The two movies are very vaguely related, about people who came under the thrall of a screwed up movie director.

An Angel at My Table

I don't like movies about children made in Britain, Australia or New Zealand if they're set in any time period before the 1980's because you just know there's going to be at least one scene of a child being caned or otherwise abused. I don't know what's wrong with those people. But I needed to turn on a movie for my mother so it was An Angel at My Table (New Zealand, 1990) directed by Jane Campion, about writer Janet Frame. She has an awful childhood like every other child in New Zealand. She's misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and spends years in a mental hospital as she blossoms as a writer.

The scene I remembered from the review on Siskel & Ebert was where she's nervously hanging around with some bohemians in Australia. She tells them she writes. They ask her if she's published anything (none of them have) and she awkwardly stuns them by telling them she's published two or three books of short stories.

But it took a while to get to that point and if you didn't know who Janet Frame was, you didn't know about her eventual triumph. 

The suffering of Caitlyn Jenner

I didn't watch it, but you remember when Caitlyn Jenner (né: Bruce Jenner) mocked homeless people on her "reality show"?

As it was reported at the time:

...Celebrated for her “courage” by no less a moral arbiter than ESPN itself, lionized even by Diane Sawyer, the slow-witted ex-Olympian–who of course has absolutely no idea what true courage it takes to survive one day of homelessness in America—has created a sad little furor by telling her girlfriends on TV that those bums on the street, those war veterans and street kids and whatnot, don’t want to work because they’re too happy getting government handouts.

...the Marie Antoinette of transgenders has done us all a favor by revealing just how shallow, venal and corrupt her kind of “courage” really is, and how gullible the media figures who celebrate her.
...
And, in the ultimate proof that she’s on the right side of history, Caitlin got her own reality show.  But no sooner had her show begun than she wobbled off-script for a moment, and our newborn Cinderella proved to be more of an old-fashioned Wicked Witch.  When one of her girlfriends talked about the importance of caring for homeless people, Jenner said, with an adorable toss of her bangs: “Don’t they make more by not working–with social progams–than they do with an entry level job?”

The other transgender women on the show–who have lived actual lives–were horrified.  When they tried to explain it to her, Jenner finally revealed her true self, the one that even Diane Sawyer failed to uncover:  “Oh, you don't want people to get  totally dependent on it.  That's when they get in trouble–‘why should I work?  I got a few bucks! I got my room paid for!”

Let’s de-construct that little beauty for a moment.  As soon as Jenner starts her feeble attempt to role-play a poor person,  she junks normal grammar–becuz poor folks iz stupid, lol!–“I got a few bucks.”  Then she faults these dumb slobs–you know, these combat veterans and mentally ill and sexually-abused women, men and children–not just for their damn laziness, but for their total lack of imagination, too–for them, a room and a few bucks (for crack, no doubt) is enough. They aren’t even ambitious enough to crave a two-room apartment, much less an L.A. mansion paid for with sex-tape money!

So anyway, Bruce Jenner's house burned down in a wildfire. Serves her right. It makes me sad that she'll get a big insurance pay-off.

[Reports were wrong. Turns out the house is still there.]

Other Side of the Wind, Robert Random et al

I "reviewed" a movie on here a while back---a terrible no-budget horror movie called Trick or Treats [sic]. It was made by the cinematographer who worked on Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind. The movie starred the guy's son. David Carradine and someone else appeared in it briefly. The guy went on to make a number of pornographic movies. He has 218 credits for cinematography on imdb.com and 143 for director.

The Other Side of the Wind had several B movie actors----Cameron Mitchell (The Toolbox Murders), Gregory Sierra (Barney Miller) and some others who appeared mostly on television. Robert Random (the young fellow who's naked through much of it) did his first semi-nude scene in Village of the Giants. He and his friends grow out of their clothes when they turn into giants and take control of a town. (Look for the Mystery Science Theater version.)

I don't know what this tells you. Don't be a snob, I guess. Anyone with a career of any kind is almost certainly better than you. 

Trackdown, Robert Culp, Sam Peckinpah

Robert Culp doesn't seem like a Western actor. He was in a half hour TV Western in the '50's called Trackdown in which he played a Texas Ranger. I watched an episode this morning that was written by Sam Peckinpah.

It was a little like Bad Day At Black Rock. Robert Culp pursues Lee Van Cleef into a town. The townsfolk protect Lee Van Cleef and plan to murder Robert Culp once it's dark. They take away his gun. They won't give him a room at the hotel. He walks around looking for someone to help him. He's mocked by an obnoxious old Confederate.

I was disappointed that Culp only killed one guy. He could have killed a lot more without upsetting the audience. He should have at least pistol-whipped the Confederate guy.

The one nice twist was that Lee Van Cleef was killed by his dead partner's girlfriend. He wanted her to shoot in Robert Culp's general direction while he made his getaway and slapped her when she refused. So she shot him and good for her. They never let women kill people in these shows.

In the end, she feels her life is over with the death of her boyfriend. There's nothing left for her until she realizes that she's entitled to a lot of reward money for killing Lee Van Cleef.

The Other Side of the Wind

Now, at long last, I understand why Orson Welles was hanging around with Henry Jaglom. Welles last movie appearance before his death was in Jaglom's Someone to Love, which, like The Other Side of the Wind, was a scripted mockumentary.

I had heard about The Other Side of the Wind, for years. It was produced for the most part with Welles' own money, and like other movies he bankrolled himself, production dragged on for years. He started in 1970, filmed off and on for a few years then post production went on until hid death in 1985.

It's always strange seeing sex and nude scenes in a movie made by a director from an earlier era. There was Stanley Donen's Blame It on Rio, Sydney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy. The Other Side of the Wind has a nude sex scene in the back of a moving car (someone else was driving). But Welles was just 55 when he began filming this movie. He was only 70 when he died. He was so young when he made Citizen Kane.

There was an Iranian investor in the movie, and I read somewhere that the movie was locked away in a vault in Iran. Turns out it was in a film lab in France. All Netflix had to do was pay the bill to get it out and finish post production on it.

Starring John Huston, with directors Peter Bogdanovich, Claud Chabrol, Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazurzky, and Dennis Hopper. With Oja Kodar, Susan Strasberg, Edmond O'Brien, George Jessel, Mercedes McCambridge, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Random, Gregory Sierra. And I didn't recognize him, but recently disgraced CBS chairman Les Moonves was in there somewhere.

The main audience for the movie is cineastes. But it's on Netflix. It wouldn't be bad if they mixed it in and promoted it with their other movies.

In the '70's, Roger Corman's company started distributing foreign films. He promoted them much more aggressively than other American distributors. If a theater wanted to book Big Bad Mama 2, they would have to show Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut as well. He was first distributor to get an Ingmar Bergman movie shown in a drive-in theater which pleased Bergman. Woody Allen saw his first Bergman movie in the early '50's because it had a naked lady.

Welles said that he thought his other mockumentary F for Fake would be a huge hit with a mass audience. That's what he was going for. The man didn't film a sex scene in the back of a speeding Mustang to appeal to the art house crowd.

It's all getting worse

Things are getting worse. I don't know why this bothers me so much.

Blockbuster and Hollywood Video killed the local video stores. I was kind of glad when Netflix killed Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, but now Netflix is getting worse and worse. Their DVD business is getting slower and slower. It's taking days to get anything. Their streaming video is all crap.

I was just getting into Filmstruck and it's going belly-up. I was weirdly drawn to Pub-D-Hub, a dirt cheap Roku channel showing public domain movies, but they aren't updating every week like they used to, like whoever runs it has gotten bored with it.

I just got rid of Comcast. I had thousands of channels that were nothing but crap.

Midterm elections

Okay, Democrats won the house, Republicans still have the Senate. Gerrymandering and voter suppression still paid off for Republicans.

Not as bad as I feared.

I'm afraid Democrats will lose

Elections tomorrow. I'm afraid Republicans are going to win. Nobody thought Trump would win in the first place. Don't get your hopes up and don't blame Russia for your problems. I'm sitting here now with MSNBC on TV and, naturally, they're predicting a massive victory for Democrats---that it may be even bigger than they imagined!

Trump, Obama and Bush, Jr, all won in part because they ran as peace candidates. After Bush and Obama, Trump is actually being praised because he hasn't started any wars yet. That's how bad it's gotten. Hillary Clinton's only real campaign promise was war on Syria which meant direct war with Russia. Democrats are outraged at the very thought of peace with North Korea or Russia. They need to knock that off and promise world peace.

A Very English Scandal

 A Very English Scandal. It opens with a scene of Hugh Grant and Alex Jennings dining at their clubs. They begin discussing their bisexuality, which I guess upper class English people do.

The mini-series is about Jeremy Thorpe, the British MP who plotted to have his former (male) lover murdered to protect his political career.

My mother had been watching two or three Hugh Grant movies they had been showing over and over on TV and someone suggested she watch this on Amazon Prime. A little surprising. Her elderly friends keep recommending movies and show, like Orange is the New Black, that I would never suggest to an old person.

We had gotten rid of Comcast earlier that day and I was showing her how Roku worked so I put that on. It was somewhat more graphic than you'd normally expect from Hugh Grant but not terribly shocking. My mother knew what they were talking about in the opening scene although they disguised their discussion somewhat. "Are you musical?" Grant asks.

I first heard about this case on 60 Minutes around the time of Thorpe's trial in the 1970s.

If you want to see something shorter covering similar subject matter, you might look at the Dirk Bogarde movie Victim, 1961. It's public domain now, available here on YouTube, on the Roku channel Pub-D-Hub and elsewhere I would imagine. The first British movie in which the term "homosexual" is used.

Aki Kaurismaki, La Havre (2011)

Okay, so I watched another Aki Kaurismaki movie, this one Le Havre, made in France with Jean-Pierre Leaud in a minor role. The story of Marcel Marx, a failed writer turned shoeshine man. While his wife is in the hospital he helps a tweenage African boy who was among a group of refugees smuggled into the country in a shipping container.

Like The Match Factory Girl in style. There was nothing documentary-like about it. Every scene was well lit, every shot well-composed. It looked beautiful. In that respect, it reminded me of The Man with a Rifle, the 1938 Soviet film I posted about a few days ago.

The movie was more like a fable. The people in the neighborhood and even a local detective conspire to protect the kid. It was a little too much. I won't tell you the ending, but I think it tried to make the kid into a Christ figure but in such an understated way, it didn't pull it off.

Available along with a few other Kaurismaki films and music videos on Filmstruck which will close up shop on the 29th of this month.

Match Factory Girl (Finland, 1990)

There was something I stumbled upon online. It was an article with a list of 20 things you could do to work up the courage to eat alone in a restaurant. It seemed insane, but there were dozens of long comments from people afraid to go into a restaurant alone. They were afraid of being judged. Judged for what, I have no idea. There were a lot of other sites talking about the same thing, also about the horror of seeing a movie alone.

I've always eaten out alone. When I was in high school, I was the only one of my friends with a job and eating out was my only luxury. If anyone ate with me, I'd end up paying for their meals so eating alone had its advantages.

Now, forty years later, I'm beginning to understand why people got mad at me for not eating out with them or not going to movies with them. They thought they couldn't go by themselves.

So. I watched this movie. The Match Factory Girl (1990, Finland) directed by Aki Kaurismaki. I guess if you're a movie director, the life of the working class must seem like living death. Working in a match factory looked okay. It was interesting to see how they were made. Wasn't an exciting job, but it was low stress.

A woman works, comes home, cooks dinner for her mother and step-father. She goes to a dance club that I heard were common in Finland. The Finnish are supposedly very shy. They invented cell phones to avoid face-to-face interaction and dancing with strangers without speaking is their preferred mode of socializing. There's a band playing--drums, guitar, violin, accordion and a singer. It looked rather pleasant to me except that the Match Factory Girl sat on a bench waiting for a man to ask her to dance and got no offers.

Later, she buys a new dress and hangs around in a night club and that's where the story picks up.

There's almost no dialog. It's nice to see a movie that's largely silent but not acted out in pantomime.

Maybe it's because it was nicely photographed, but the Match Factory Girl's life seemed pretty good if she could just cope with a muted social life.

I won't give anything away because the last twenty minutes came as a bit of a surprise to me. She turns into a lonely, below average Walter White in her way.

Available on Filmstruck. It won't be around much longer so act fast.