Beautiful Boy

Bjorn Andreson

In the ad campaign for Death in Venice, they promoted Bjorn Andreson as "The most beautiful boy in the world." The kid was sixteen and he couldn't have been happy about that. No teenage boy wants to be "beautiful". Maybe if they called him "The most ruggedly masculine boy in the world". Years later, he wasn't pleased when the feminist Germaine Greer used a photo of him without his permission on the cover of her pro-ephebophilia book, The Beautiful Boy.

Now we have Timothee Chalamet in the title role of Beautiful Boy based on the book by a bourgeois father with a drug addict for a son.

It's distributed by Amazon even though Chalamet helped sabotage Rainy Day in New York which Woody Allen directed for Amazon. Chalamet was one of the stars of that movie. He later announced he was on Ronan Farrow's side, denounced Allen and said he was sorry he was in it.

The title Beautiful Boy was from a John Lennon song, but I don't know what it's supposed to mean here.

I haven't seen it but here's something from a review in the New Republic:

...But turning a drug addict into a handsome young man with good skin and a ton of potential to waste—that’s easy. All you do is cast a pretty guy and let him cry onscreen in his mother’s arms, maybe give him some poetry to read aloud. (Nic does Bukowski, and I’m not even joking.) Sprinkle a little hope on him at the end and you’ve got yourself a tragic hero. 

That’s a problem, because being addicted to drugs in 2018 means bystanders filming you passed out in a dollar store. Of course there are plenty of beloved, middle-class people who have the struggles of Ben and Nic, and their suffering cannot be denied. But in defense of sheer reality, there are a lot more addicts who can’t afford dentistry and look unattractive because of it. These are people whom you might cross the street to avoid. Homelessness isn’t Timothée Chalamet draped handsomely across a diner; it’s contemptuous glances and shame. The women and men of Heroin(e) have universally bad skin and radiate that specific narcotic waxiness that comes from long-term abuse, because that’s what it looks like. In short, drug addiction is usually a story about poverty, inflected by race, and these movies are looking in the totally opposite direction.

Blind Man (aka Blindman) 1971

At least one spaghetti western was inspired by a samurai movie. This one may have been inspired by Zatoichi, the blind swordsman.

A blind gunman helps transport fifty mailorder brides to their husbands in Texas.

Ringo Starr was hard to spot in it. The men all looked alike. I couldn't tell if he dubbed his own voice but if he did it was without the Liverpool accent.

It's all changed with the switch to video---now recording live sound is the easiest thing in the world. If you look at old books on amateur or low budget filmmaking, they give arguments for dubbing. You can hire actors (or non actors) for looks and have real actors dub their lines. You can change lines in post production and no one can tell as long as you use the same number of syllables. The director can speak to actors while filming, you can use any camera whether it's suited to live sound or not and you don't have to muffle the camera noise. You can film next to a freeway or airport, you don't have to take time for sound set-ups and you may not have to do retakes for flubbed lines. You'd have to be crazy NOT to dub.

They made interesting use of existing locations in Spain. One of the few westerns with a castle.

I couldn't follow the plot.

Going In Style (1979)

George Burns stares down preschooler.

I talked about the movie Hamsun on here a while back, about the Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian writer who was pro-Nazi even after the Germans invaded his country. The movie starts with him at 75 telling his wife he's not going to live much longer and could die at any moment. If he had known he was going to live another 18 years, he might not have been so quick to commit treason.

In Going in Style, three old men decide to give themselves a new lease on life by robbing a bank. Unlike Hamsun, they were fictional characters and, as old people in movies tend to do, they start dying for no reason. It makes their decision to become criminals seem pretty reasonable.

But George Burns was 83 when he starred in this movie. Like Hamsun, he lived another 17 years in real life, but I don't know how long his character lasted.

With Lee Strasberg and Art Carney. All three were great. It was nice seeing George Burns not being as cute as in some of the other films he made late in life.

Military punishment

One time I listened to this thing on public radio about the Lewis & Clark expedition. They were reading from journals recorded at the time. You'd be amazed at how much flogging there was. It was a military expedition and they kept flogging the troops. They kept on and on about the flogging. I can't remember why they did this, but Lewis & Clark were horrible people.

I was reminded of this when I read about the U.S. Navy eliminating "bread and water confinement" as an administrative punishment beginning in 2019. According to RT:

The administrative punishment that dates back to the age of sail was applied against sailors in the lowest three pay grades for insubordination, unauthorized absences or lewd behavior.

For example, one sailor aboard the submarine support ship USS Frank Cable was punished in the mid-1980s for running naked through the women’s berthing, Brenda Lettera, the ship’s cook, told Stripes.

“They get to eat as much bread as they want during the time,” Lettera said, explaining she gave the sailor two to three loaves for each meal. “Except for raisin bread. That wasn’t allowed.”

The punishment came into being in 1855, when the US Navy outlawed flogging. It was considered a progressive reform at the time, as the British Royal Navy continued flogging sailors until 1879.

 I had no idea anything like that existed.

Maybe it's easier than I thought

 
As a child, I had no idea how things worked. Jimmy Osmond was slightly younger than me, so when they said on TV that he was the youngest person to have a gold record, I was crushed that I would never be the youngest person to achieve this. I couldn't sing.

There was Tatum O'Neal's Oscar, the kid who played the ape boy on the old Land of the Lost who was the youngest person to get a black belt in karate---they were all slightly younger than me.

I had no idea that being a recording artist, a movie star or a martial artist required any work, that they weren't things that just fell into your lap out of nowhere.

But maybe I was right.

Andy Kindler was cast in the movie The Fiddling Horse, a role that was written for him. His friend and podcast co-host Josh "Elvis" Weinstein was given a small role in the same movie. Then, after a production delay, the star left the movie and Weinstein was promoted to star. Weinstein who was a writer and stand-up comic with no experience as an actor except for his time on Mystery Science Theater 3000 when he was a teenager.

My sister-in-law was appearing in a remake if a 1920's horror movie. Her brother dropped by the location to bring her something. He wasn't an actor, but the director saw him and gave him a pretty good part in the movie.

Timothy Bottoms' little brother was sent to spend the summer with him on the set of The Last Picture Show and they gave him a role in the movie. Didn't the poor kid have a sex scene?

And there are other cases. Tony Dow tagged along when his friend went to audition for Leave It To Beaver and was hired to play Wally himself. There were local kids in Dazed and Confused. The old guy in the diner in Midnight Run.

And, this is a different thing. We didn't have babysitters when I was past preschool. My mother didn't care. We just hung around. But she hired a high school girl to babysit us one time. She was the sister of a friend of my brother's, so I decided to keep it in mind when I heard she was a prominent extra in National Lampoon's Animal House, the blond girl in Donald Sutherland's class. I thought I'd be able to impress people with the fact that my old babysitter was an extra in a movie.

I was working at a place years later and she came in working on some charity event. I was helping her throw some trash in the dumpster. To make conversation, I said, "So...you were in Animal House, weren't you?"

She was shocked. She had no idea who I was and I didn't tell her. I let her think I was an idiot-savant who could somehow recognize movie extras I had seen twenty years earlier.

Woody Allen's 83

 
Woody Allen's 83. Just seven more years and we could have an American movie director in his 90's. That's all I'm asking for. Think of the inspiration he would be to old people everywhere.

He hasn't been popular in decades. And yet Dylan Farrow is very proud of herself for "bringing him down". He has a net worth of $80 million. She didn't bring him down that far.

She brought some harm to her mother. Mia Farrow has been exposed as a child abuser, there was talk of her being stripped of her UNICEF "ambassadorship", and we know now that she had three-way sex with Woody Allen and a teen model he was dating. People keep bringing up Mia's brother who's in prison for child molesting. She's completely alienated from a number of "her" children and two of them committed suicide.

We have the racist spectacle of Dylan and Ronan Farrow, Mia Farrow's favorite white children, slamming their Asian siblings for talking about the abuse they suffered at the hands of their sick narcissist of a mother. Dylan and Ronan have no idea how Mia Farrow treated Moses and Soon-yi as children--when Ronan was four, Moses was starting high school and Soon-yi was in college. Ronan was three or four when Mia Farrow coaxed Dylan into making her false accusation again Allen----he doesn't know anything except what his mother drilled into him.

I know I'm repeating myself.

The trouble is that Allen is in it for the money. He gets paid his directing fee and his writing fee whether the movies make a profit or not.

He's been steadily downgrading over the years. At one point he started using a cheaper crew. His old crew was working cheap anyway and they were naturally upset when he callously dumped them. They had complained that he cut their pay while he was still living it up with his rich friends on location. He quit doing all the re-shooting he used to do. His movies still cost what seems like a lot considering that they're just scenes of people talking.

He should look at Eric Rohmer. Rohmer kept cutting down on his crew, eliminating jobs. I hear his last movie was just him, a camera operator and a sound guy. 

And there was Manoel de Oliviera. He was 106 and was working on a movie when he died. They were filming it in a garden close to his home to make it easier on him. Woody Allen couldn't do that? Have two guys and some actors at that vacation mansion he bought with his Midnight in Paris money?

Merry Xmas!

Ah! Christmas eve! The holiday is so much better without a Christmas tree, presents or decorations! My mother hasn't recovered completely after being in the hospital. I ordered presents she wants to give people on Amazon. But she told me she didn't get me anything. I told her not to.

My brothers won't be able to come to town, my sister is out of town with her husband. I figured I'd have a few extra days to shop but now I'm out of time.

I know a few places that'll be open Xmas day, but I'll probably run over to the hospital cafeteria and get a couple of Xmas dinners to go.

What's Up, Doc (1972)

I remember liking the movie but I'd forgotten how much I hated Barbara Streisand. She thought she was so cute. Stars Ryan O'Neal and Madeline Kahn. With Mabel Albertson (Darren Stevens' mother from Bewitched), Kenneth Mars and Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard.

In Order of Disappearance

I read on cracked.com that Hollywood is doing a remake of it. Will star Liam Neeson. I had seen it before and decided to watch it again. My mother keeps wanting to see movies but she doesn't know what she wants to see. She doesn't like old movies but she doesn't want to see any nudity or sex and she doesn't want any obscene language. So I was looking through Netflix and other Roku channels. Settled on this. How could she object to a snow plow driver who hunts down the terrible people who murdered his son? And she seems to like the movie okay.

Each time someone dies, their name appears on screen with a cross. Except for the Jewish guy. He gets a Star of David.

It bothers me a little that I would be useless if I had to kill Norwegians. I could shoot them if I got close enough to them and they didn't shoot me first, but I couldn't beat information out of them.

Serbian criminals are shocked to see Norwegians cleaning up after their dog.

She's picking up its pooh.

What does she do with it?

Who knows. It's a Norwegian thing.

A little like the Russian movie Dead Man's Bluff, or Zhmurki (Жмурки) in certain respects. Could make a nice double feature if you could take that much violence.

Woody Allen, Timothee Chalamet, etc

Is there still time? Has Woody Allen's movie with Timothee Chalamet movie been released? Could Allen re-edit it, use Chalamet's worst takes to make him look bad? Remember how, at the beginning of the sound era, one of the studios ended an actor's career by making his voice sound funny? 

These actors appear in Allen's movies for next to nothing, paid the union minimum. They only do it if they don't have a REAL job, and they do it because actors keep winning Oscars for Allen's movies. But they turned on him and announced that they're donating the tiny amount they got paid to the #metoo movement, like it's a big sacrifice and like it's somehow hurting Allen. They can give away their Oscars if they want to give away something.

Perhaps ironically, Chalamet hit it big with his pro-teenager-sleeping-with-a-grown-up movie Call Me By Your Name.

I said before that Allen should start using lesser-known actors, people who actually need the money. He makes so many movies he would quickly have a veritable army of grateful actors to defend him. He could do what Roger Corman used to do to cast movies. He would go through lists of Screen Actors Guild members and look for names he recognized who hadn't worked in a while. 

I don't know how I should feel about Allen having three-way sex forty years ago or dating a high school girl. Those days are long gone. But he must have had some idea that if word got out that it might affect his career. 

On the other hand, Jerry Seinfeld started dating his wife when she was seventeen and he's not a pariah.

I Passed for White (1960), Lost Boundaries (1949)

My mother wanted to watch a movie. She didn't know what. I looked around on Roku. Came across I Passed for White, about a young woman (Sonya Wilde) who marries rich WASP James Franciscus never telling him she's Black. When she runs into her darker complected jazz musician brother, her husband attacks him. "GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY WIFE!" She still doesn't tell him. When she gets pregnant, she worries that the baby will look Black.

In one scene, she's a much better dancer than the other ladies at the country club and her horrible husband stops her.

I was surprised that they kept referring to African-Americans as "Black" in the movie. I thought that was still a racial slur in 1960, but maybe that was the point.

We watched it to the end. My mother didn't think it was very good. So there was another movie I knew was on there. I showed her Lost Boundaries, 1949, about a doctor who, with his wife, passed for white for over twenty years. They lived in a small New England town. They had the same problem, worrying that they would be exposed when their children were born.



The father joined the Navy during World War Two because they had a severe shortage of doctors, but the US military was segregated. In the Navy, Blacks could only work in food service. A Naval Intelligence officer shows up. They investigated him. He had been a member of a Black fraternity in college. "Do you have Negro blood?"

Word gets out in town that the family is Black. The daughter's boyfriend hears the news. He tells her, They're saying your family is Negro!

"Did they say anything bad about us?" she says. Best line in the movie.

Spielberg wants to make a Rashomon mini-series

According to imdb.com, there were two American made-for-TV versions made in 1960 and 1961, one of them directed by Sidney Lumet.

Now Spielberg plans to make a ten-part Rashomon TV miniseries.

Kurosawa's 1950 movie was based on a short story by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa. I read the story long ago and don't know how you stretch it out to ten hours. It's a little surprising Kurosawa squeezed an 88 minute movie out of it.

If Spielberg wants to promote foreign films, he could do what Roger Corman did. He started distributing foreign films in the '70's and bundled them with his exploitation films. If a theater wanted Big Bad Mama, Crazy Mama or Bloody Mama, they had to show Ingmar Bergman, too. They should bundle whatever crap Spielberg is churning out these days---the Transformers or Jurasic Park "films"---and bundle them with old Kurosawa movies.

"Mother! How could you!"

Has Ronan Farrow said anything about this latest Woody Allen thing? Because, if he did, he'd have to acknowledge that his degenerate mother had three-ways with Woody Allen and a hapless teen.

You think a predisposition to degeneracy is hereditary? Because Ronan has terrible genes. His maternal grandparents were alcoholics, his maternal uncle is a convicted child molester and his parents were swingers. At least his paternal grandparents lived to be extremely old so he has that going for him.

According to the Daily Mail:

Social media users started a backlash against Mia Farrow on Monday, suggesting the actress - who has accused her ex Woody Allen of being a child predator - is a hypocrite for her alleged participation in his threesomes with younger women. 

Twitter users pointed out Farrow's alleged role in the movie director's relationship with Babi Christina Engelhardt, insisting she should be criticized more for being an enabler after the former model claimed she took part in drug-fueled sex with them both when she was 20.

If the story is true and Mia stayed with Allen throughout, it could beg the question of why Farrow has failed to mention it but has shared other stories about her ex that don't pose a risk to her reputation. 

One Tweet read: 'What is Mia and her famous son Ronan Farrow going to say? Why hasn’t he exposed this sex scandal? Ronan you believe her don’t you?'

Terminal, USA (1993)

A Japanese-American family. The grandfather is not quite comatose. One son is a drug dealer who's been shot in the leg but won't go to the hospital. The daughter is a cheerleader with a sex tape who's going to run away with a sex trafficker. The other son, the good one, is in high school, dresses neatly and studies hard.

Someone compared the Terminal, USA to an early John Waters movie and I understand the comparison. But Waters' movies had foot fetishes, sex with chickens, incest.... All Terminal, USA had was a gay kid. Was that really considered shocking in 1993?

Filmed on a constructed set. 59 minutes. Directed by Jon Moritsugu.

Available on Fandor.

Woody Allen

All these years I've defended Woody Allen. And I was right---he didn't molest Dylan and he's been married to Soon-yi for so long that it was obviously a wise move on both their parts.

But now a 59-year-old former teen model, Christina Engelhardt, claims that she dated him long ago when she was sixteen and he was forty-one. They were together for eight years, she said, so I don't know how old she was when she did this, but she said that they had "threesomes" with Mia Farrow. If she was sixteen when they did that, Mia Farrow was guilty of a monstrous crime herself.

Remember the shame Woody Allen's character felt in Manhattan when his friends were reading his ex-wife's tell-all book which revealed they had three-ways?

We already knew about Allen's other girlfriend back then, Stacey Nelkin, the one who was 17. He acknowledged that. Seventeen is the age of consent in New York.

Would it have killed Allen to make Muriel Hemingway's character 19 or 20 in Manhattan? Make her a college girl? His dating her would have been shameful but not so monstrous.

I always thought that Allen had painted himself into a corner. As long as he was with Mia Farrow, he had to put her in every single one of his movies. He said himself that it had gone on too long. The only way to end it was to destroy their relationship. Which is too bad because they were made for each other, a couple of degenerates.

For Soon-yi, Woody was her ticket out of Mia Farrow's abusive household. For Woody, Soon-yi removed that millstone from around his neck.

I hope Allen's career continues. America needs a director who'll continue working into his 90's and he's our best hope.

Allen's movies are low budget by Hollywood standards but they still cost way too much. As it is now, he gets paid for writing and directing his movies whether they make any money or not. Movies cost less to film in Europe---Call Me By Your Name, for example, cost $3.5 million. He can't make a movie that cheap?

Allen is rich enough that he can make a movie a year for as long as he wants. He may not get the stars he wants but the world's full of actors. Orson Welles bankrolled his own movies. It would probably be good for him to put some thought into profitability for a change. As it is, most of his movies lose money or make so little that the idea that anyone could "bring him down" is absurd.

Wheel of Ashes (France, 1968)

It's mostly silent with voice over and music with some synchronized verbiage.  A young fellow mopes around Paris wallowing in existential angst for some reason. A lot about various religions. Starts with a title about karma and reincarnation.

The black and white shots of Paris look good. Made me wonder if you could do anything like it on video. (Of course you could. Look at The Cruise.)

Made by New Yorker Peter Emmanuel Goldman. That guy turned out to be an asshole. In 1983, he produced a "documentary" for a pro-Israeli group accusing NBC news of not being adequately pro-Israel during the invasion of Lebanon.

90 minutes. Way too long. Available on Fandor.

In the Heat of the Night, the TV show

I sat through an episode for the first time while visiting my mother in the hospital. She slept through it. I was disappointed by it. Virgil Tibbs wasn't smarter than everybody else. The town wasn't semi-impoverished. The cops weren't scrawny and dumb. The police chief talked too slow. They didn't arrest people and refuse to release them until they agreed not to sue for false arrest.

It had harmonica music, but it was regular harmonica, not bass harmonica. Everything happened in daylight and it didn't look hot out.

Another Girl, Another Planet (1992)

So, I watched Another Girl, Another Planet, a short feature filmed on a Fisher-Price PXL2000. It was pretty good. A lot of it was in close-up because of the low resolution I would imagine, but the longer shots worked okay, too. Perhaps not surprisingly, it's about hipsters in the East Village. Womanizing hipsters. Available on Fandor.

It looked interesting and was a pretty good movie, but what do I know. I was marveling at the wonders of Pixel Vision. The picture was a little dark and fuzzy.

I always wished I had a PXL2000. I've written about it before on here how my friends talked me out of buying one in a Toys R Us. Why did I listen to them?

I'm finally over that and I have this movie to thank.

Now I hope people can learn to appreciate other obsolete formats. VHS, Video8. SVHS, Hi8. They all have something to contribute. I have a lovely standard definition MiniDV Canon XL1 sitting in view as I write this.

Come to think of it, I haven't heard any mention of The Blair Witch Project in years.

Poetic justice

Then there's poetic justice. The guilty must be punished. There were some TV crimes shows where they would try to show how gritty and realistic they were by having someone get away with their crimes. On Miami Vice, an acquitted murderer is killed by his victim's wife as he leaves the courthouse. Hill Street Blues would let someone get away with murder in one episode only to be murdered themselves in the next.

I don't know why this is, but watching Soviet action films like Pirates of the 20th Century or White Sun of the Desert, I find it more jarring when characters are killed. Hollywood movies telegraph who's going to die. You can usually tell which characters will be killed as soon as you see them.

There was the Israeli movie, Delta Force, with Chuck Norris. One member of the Delta Force signs off on the radio by saying "I'll see ya when I see ya." The first time he said that, I knew he was going to die and that his dying words would be, "I'll see ya [gasp] when I see ya!"

The poor man's High Noon

Trying to get his ex-girlfriend to help him even though he
just married his new girlfriend.

Silver Lode, 1954

Kind of dull. Made two years after High Noon, had some elements in common and may have been a bit more explicit in its attack on McCarthyism, with the villain named "McCarty".

A man named Ballard in the town of Silver Lode is getting married when an apparent federal marshall and his deputies right into town. The marshall has a federal warrant for his arrest and claims Ballard murdered his brother. The townspeople gradually turn against Ballard and he finally has to shoot it out with everybody. His previous girlfriend, the local harlot/showgirl/hostess, helps.

Technicolor, 4:5 aspect ratio. RKO pictures. 77 minutes.

John Payne wasn't very interesting as Ballard. With Alan Hale, Jr, as one of the deputies.

Available on Fandor.

Good murders and bad murders

They did this years ago on Columbo. Dick Van Dyke played a photographer who murdered his wife who was a terrible person. Everyone likes Dick Van Dyke, and his wife in the episode was so terrible, they didn't want people to get mad at Columbo for arresting him, so they had Dick Van Dyke murder an innocent, likable ex-convict he hired who was grateful that someone was willing to give him a job after getting out of prison. This seems to happen a lot in murder stories.

The Talented Mr Ripley murdered only obnoxious rich people. So at the end, they tacked on another murder, a victim who didn't do anything so we'd know that Mr Ripley was a very bad man.

The implication is that some murderers are perfectly nice and their victims deserve to die.

I guess there are people who believe this. There have been cases in the news where men try to impress women by claiming to have killed people. Mark Fuhrman was one example. Another was disgraced congressman Wes Cooley who wooed his common-law wife by telling her he had been an assassin for the CIA.

Slingblade was the only good movie about a good murder. The Slingblade guy killed a horrible person but he still needed to be locked up in the end.

There have been movies in which kidnappers were presented as perfectly nice, reasonable people. Thay had good reason to abduct someone for ransom. 

I've never understood these movies where professional killers are the heroes. There was a French movie where a hit man is so offended that he was hired to kill a child that he hunts down the people who hired him. The Mafia does murder children. The pope denounced them after two cases where they murdered preschoolers.

On Breaking Bad, they made that monster Mike Ehrmantraut into a sympathetic character. Viewers were actually unhappy that Walt killed him.

Kurosawa's Yojimbo arranged things in the end so the bad people could all be wiped out without Toshiro Mifune having to kill Seibe's wife, son or either of the old guys--the sake brewer and the silk merchant.

And one last thing about that episode of Columbo.

Columbo caught Dick Van Dyke in the end because he brought him to the police lab. There were several Polaroid cameras sitting on a shelf. Dick Van Dyke unthinkingly grabbed the right camera somehow knowing it was the one used to take the photo of his tied-up wife used in the fake ransom note he sent himself.

It was obvious that that was the camera. The print had a large tag on one end that was characteristic of the older Polaroids. That was the only camera that could have taken the picture. Even I knew that.

Filmmakers exploit disaster in the '70's

There's a retired Hollywood guy who lives in the area. My sister went to a garage sale at his house and bought a large reel of 16mm film. There's no sound. It appears that some young people tried filming a nuclear apocalypse survival movie.

They filmed in a neighborhood that had been wiped out in a wildfire. A group of hippies wander through the area. We see them running from something. A helicopter flies past in the distance. They filmed a kid playing basketball in a burnt out cul-de-sac for some reason. I can't imagine anything came of it. It wouldn't have been any good if it had.

But it's something to keep in mind next time there's a horrible, horrible disaster.

The Fiddling Horse

Josh "Elvis" Weinstein has tweeted that he's off to Louisiana to begin filming on The Fiddling Horse, the Andy Kindler vehicle directed by C.J. Wallis.

You might recall that there was a delay. Weinstein and Kindler discussed this on their Thought Spiral podcast. Read about it here.

It has nothing to do with me, but I want to keep everybody informed.

Tweeted later by J Elvis Weinstein.

On the set.


Andy Kindler in hat with dog.

Hogan's Heroes

I don't know if a Nazi POW camp is an inherently offensive setting for a sit-com. Stalag 17 had its comedic elements. But I wasn't allowed to watch Hogan's Heroes when I was a kid. My father found it objectionable.

The show's producers obviously saw the problem. It couldn't have been a coincidence that the main Nazi characters were played by Jewish actors. John Banner and Robert Clary had been in concentration camps. Banner was in one before the war and was released because he agreed to leave the country. Werner Klemperer, John Banner and Leon Askin fled Germany and came to the US.

Now a local channel shows two episodes every night at 10. I don't know how I feel about it now. Bob Crane was a right-wing sex addict, but it was an early show to have a Black character. Colonel Klink is terrified of being sent to the Russian Front which might be an acknowledgment that the Soviets did most of the fighting in that war. But the espionage plots don't interest me and I only find Colonel Klink amusing.

A few years ago, there was some talk of a Hogan's Heroes movie. If they ever make one, I hope there won't be any merchandising. No Nazi prison camp play sets with Nazi action figures.

Quietly on by, Frank V. Ross

This makes it look more interesting than it is.

A movie about a balding unemployed guy in his 20's, unappealing but not in an interesting way. He lives with his mother and sister and thinks being a waiter is beneath him. Shot on video. Picture is low contrast. Nothing looks or sounds very good. Dialog sounds improvised and not in a good way. He hangs around. His friends don't like him.

An hour and thirty two minutes. They could have cut it down to about fifteen minutes and it still wouldn't have been very good.

I guess it was like the time I watched Love Story and couldn't get the image of Erich Segal out of my head. I kept imagining him sitting smugly at his typewriter writing what he thought was clever dialog, all the time thinking it was an antidote to the filth permeating society at the time.

This movie, I kept picturing the director thinking everything he did was brilliant and real.

I didn't make it to the end. Maybe the last twenty minutes would have made it all worthwhile.

Startling truth about Mystery Science Theater 3000

It was something I didn't know.

On the latest episode of the Thought Spiral podcast (Test Show #82 available here) Josh "Elvis" Weinstein reveals why he left Mystery Science Theater 3000. He had excellent reason to go. For one thing, I don't know what the minimum wage was in Minnesota, but he wasn't paid much more than that. He got paid a fraction of what the others got--he said $200 a week. I'm not sure if he meant that literally. If so, he was making minimum wage. He was the only one who didn't get a share of the company. Joel Hodgson and Jim Mallon were responsible for this outrage.

Weinstein left the show, went to Hollywood and was the most successful of any of them.

Weinstein said that part of his conflict with older cast members was that they thought they had finally found their thing. Weinstein thought the show would be the first of many things for him. It wasn't going to be his life from then on.

I had always thought that the others were trapped in the vortex of MST3k. Much like the fellows trapped in the thing with the robots, they were were unable to escape. After it went off the air, they did Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic which are exactly like Mystery Science Theater. But it seems they were happy with this.

Listen to the podcast. You'll also hear a discussion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

Weinstein made me feel better about having never been a wunderkind.

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

This only occurred to me when I saw it last night. This was Jonathan Winters' first gig after his nervous breakdown and hospitalization. He was surprisingly open about it at the time. He talked about it on one of his records we had when I was a kid. But, in the movie, he destroys the gas station because Phil Silvers has convinced Arnold Stang and Marvin Kaplan that he's an escaped mental patient. Seems like that hit a little too close to home.

There was a horrible incident in the early '70's I won't go into, but I saw it on the news as a child and was traumatized by it. Because of that, the end of the movie always horrified me. I can't watch it even now. How is that funny?

And now all the car wrecks in the days before seat belts are horrifying. Innocent by-standers are run off the road. Sid Cesar and Edie Adams would have died of smoke inhalation. I was a surprised at how much everyone hated cops back then, or at least that they were so open about this in a movie, and Jonathan Winters says something about businessmen who rob and steal from people every day.

And now I just feel bad about all the people who had their parts cut. Buster Keaton for one. Stan Freberg just sits in the background while Andy Devine does all the talking---I assume he had more to do than that.

Most of the main characters in it were terrible actors. Mickey Rooney was the only one who reacted appropriately to Jimmy Durante's death.

They kept calling Ethel Merman an "old bag" even thought she was 55. She was the same age as her son-in-law Milton Berle.

You think the black couple being driven off the road was racist? And there was all the misogyny, with Mickey Rooney's crack about the "emancipation of women".

Was it normal in 1963 for a man to offer a child money to get in a car with him the way Phil Silvers did?

And, while I'm discussing it, there was a scene early on before they start their high speed chase. Jonathan Winters is in the truck behind everyone else. He goes slower and slower. The others wonder what he was doing. He finally stops the truck. He gets out and tip-toes along the shoulder around a curve and finds all the others standing there demanding to know what he was doing. He lies at first and then admits, "All right. I was just trying to---aw shucks."

What was he trying to do? It made no sense. They decide to get their cars off the road---they're parked on a curve. They point to a place behind them. How did they turn those huge cars around and how could they do it safely when they were parked on a curve?

When Dick Shawn hung up on his mother, why didn't she just call him again?

This was cut out and restored in some versions, but when Dick Shawn hangs up the phone, he says,
"That's my mommy. She's gone crazy or something. MAYBE RAPE!" What kind of joke is that?

Freud vs Manchurian Candidate

They were made the same year, 1962. I don't know if one influenced the other but they both used the same gimmick in the hypnosis scenes.

Freud was directed by John Huston, The Manchurian Candidate by John Frankenheimer.

I haven't seen Freud in years. It used to be on TV now and then.

In The Manchurian Candidate, we have the dream sequences where we see the captured soldiers under hypnosis. It alternates between seeing what they were supposed to be seeing under hypnosis, that there were at a ladies' garden club meeting and what actually happened, they were in front of a group of North Korean, Chinese and Soviets who were all speaking in English for some reason.

In Freud, Susanna York is put under hypnoses by another psychiatrist to relive a traumatic event, the death of her father. This should help her overcome the trauma, but they've done it several times and it does no good. Freud sees what the problem is.

First, under hypnosis, she tells the story of what happened and we see it in a dream-like flashback. There was knocking at their door. Doctors came from the Protestant hospital to inform them that her father had died. The girl goes with the doctors to the hospital to identify his body. At the hospital, they're playing music for the patients downstairs. We see patients and nurses gathered to listen. A nun takes them upstairs to the room where her father lies dead.

Freud starts questioning her more assertively. Doctors don't leave the hospital to tell people someone has died. They were pounding on the door and yelling.

"Vhat vere dey yellink?" Freud says.

"Open up! Police"

We see the same scenes again, this time as they really were.

It wasn't a hospital. It was a brothel. We see the ladies and their customers listening to music. They weren't Protestants---they were prostitutes. It wasn't a nun who led them to the room---it was a madame.

I was just visiting the hospital. This came to mind when I came downstairs and they were playing music for the patients.

Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984)

Long, long ago, a friend insisted that I watch the Penelope Spheeris documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization. Punk rockers seemed like horrible people. A couple of repellent punk girls talk about finding a housepainter who had died of a heart attack while working on the house. They had fun taking pictures of themselves with his body. Asked if they felt any sympathy for the man who died, they said, No. Because I hate painters.

Many years later, I watched this other Penelope Spheeris movie, The Boys Next Door with Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield as two high school seniors who travel to the big city and begin murdering people. Made in 1985. It was just bad. During a car chase, the driver Caulfield sees a way to outmaneuver police. Instead of simply doing it, he says, "WATCH THIS!" before swerving. Visually it was so middling that I thought maybe it would look better in black and white. I adjusted the TV and turned the color down. It didn't help at all.

It would have looked better filmed on Super 8 like Desperate Teenage Lovedolls made a year earlier in 1984 by David Markey. Made for "$250 plus bus fare", it shows the rise and fall of a punk rock girl band. One girl escapes from the mental hospital her parents committed her to. They kill another girl's mother who was played by a man in drag who speaks in falsetto. That made the murder less upsetting than it might have been.

The film stole incidental music from The Brady Bunch, The Beatles and used "Stairway to Heaven" on the soundtrack at one point.

A competing girl band forces one into a knife fight. "Now the Lovedolls are wanted for TWO murders!"

Another Lovedoll is raped by a record producer.

Forty-nine minutes. The Super 8 picture is a bit fuzzy but looks okay. In the days before digital video, it was either that or VHS.

Available on Fandor.