Sue Lyon, 73, RIP

I saw Lolita (1962) in high school. They showed the Stanley Kubrick movie at the university. Two women sat behind me whispering loudly about what a pig Humbert Humbert was. Humbert's character seemed more likable than he should have been, so they weren't necessarily stating the obvious.

Sue Lyon has died at 73. Lolita was her first movie role. Her only roles before that were in episodes of Dennis the Menace and The Loretta Young Show. She had almost no experience and held her own against James Mason and Shelley Winters.

Lyon's second movie was Night of the Iguana. She appeared in several decent movies in the '60's but her career went downhill in the '70's. Her last credit was a 1980 monster movie called Alligator. Her career lasted eighteen years.

Christmas is over

Christmas is done. I got three presents, all of them books, one I already owned and one was an affront to my politics. My mother didn't get me anything, but I told her not to and I did all her Christmas shopping so how could she? I was supposed to have the week off except for Monday, but I worked Christmas Eve and Thursday which was okay.

Christmas dinner wasn't very good. I don't know how this came up, but my brother-in-law became weirdly enraged when I said that most lawyers were Republicans. He demanded to know my basis for that. I told him that, when conservatives complained that universities were run by liberals, it was pointed out that law schools, medical schools and business schools were predominately Republican. He denied that doctors skewed Republican, too. I don't know why he was so angry about it and he kept arguing. At least he didn't accuse me of anti-Semitism this time.

I watched My Night at Maud's and started watching another French movie about a dysfunctional family at Xmas. I watched a few minutes of a black & white Christmas episode of The Beverly Hillbillies and maybe five seconds of the girls on The Facts of Life singing a Christmas carol.

This Christmas was a massive loss. Spent over $500 and got three books in return. I could have bought a pretty good car for what this thing cost me.

Brian De Palma's Domino (2019)

Remember on Miami Vice when Don Johnson sleeps with a woman who swipes his gun when he goes back to work and he doesn't notice that his holster is two pounds lighter until he's in a gunfight and finds he has to use his back-up gun? Then he goes back to get his gun and tells her, "That was a major un-cool, baby."

Cops really do carry "back-up guns", but usually they're to plant on unarmed people they've killed. I remember a case where an exceptionally thrifty cop used a cap gun for this purpose. He wasn't charged with any crime, but they fired him thus enraging the police union.

Paul Schrader attacked Brian De Palma, and it seems like someone else said something rude about him, so I turned on Brian De Palma's terrorism movie, Domino, which was listed as one of the ten worst movies of the year. Set in Denmark. Starring a guy with a Polish-looking name.

The movie begins with a Danish cop hurrying to work and forgetting his gun. This gets his partner killed by a terrorist, then they steal a scene from Veritgo.

The movie is in English. They distinguish the Americans from the Danes by having the CIA agents act obnoxious and speak in vaguely Southwestern accents.

At no time in history have Europeans had any real qualms about killing people, but their cops have different approaches to carrying guns. In Diva (France, 1981) the police chief borrows the detective's gun because he did bring his. Carlos the Jackal escaped arrest at one point because the cops came to his apartment on their way home from work and weren't armed. In Insomnia (Norway, 1997) the Norwegian police comment on how the Swedish police carry their guns all the time. In the Swedish detective series Wallander, someone lectures Kurt Wallander that shooting people is a requirement of the job.

De Palma stole that other Alfred Hitchcock thing. Vertigo was set in San Francisco, so the opening shot is of a cable car, Hitchcock's movie about spies in Holland had their secret headquarters in a windmill. In North by Northwest, they have the UN building in New York, big giant cornfields in the midwest and it ends at Mt Rushmore.

In this movie, they drive through Holland stop in front of a big windmill and it ends in a bullfighting arena in Spain.

It wasn't terrible but it wasn't very interesting.

Something from The Onion

In case there's any doubt, yes, I know, The Onion isn't real.

My failure in life hasn't bothered me that much. Deep down, I always knew this is how I'd end up. But I've always wondered how people feel when their movies turn out really bad. I look at movies and imagine the heartbroken families of the actors.

The child actor who starred in Troll 2 thought he was well on his way to success having starred in a feature film. Then his parents gave him a videotape of the movie for Christmas. He put it in the VCR and his dreams of success evaporated.

On the other hand, my sister-in-law appeared in a bad horror movie. She knew it was awful, but she didn't care. She got paid and she was thankful she got killed off in the first ten minutes so her friends could see her and turn it off.

I'm a little apprehensive how another movie she appeared in will turn out. She was much happier with it. It was made by some recent film school grads, but it's still in post production.

And here, from The Onion:

LOS ANGELES—Stunned into silence after reading through thousands of highly critical comments about the new film, James Darnell, the CG supervisor for Cats, spoke up quietly Thursday to note that he thought he actually did an okay job. “Honestly, I think the end result didn’t turn out so bad at all,” said Darnell, stressing that the widely panned sight of Taylor Swift, Jason Derulo, and James Corden as computer-generated cats singing and dancing through London alleyways represented three grueling years of his life. “For months, I stayed up late rendering textures to make sure the whiskers looked just right on the face of [Idris Elba’s character] Macavity. That was hard, all right? And when I was finally finished, I was so proud that I showed my wife some of the concept art. I don’t know. Obviously, it’s a silly little thing, but—I mean, Jesus Christ, this is my life these people are tearing apart. Have some fucking decency.” At press time, Darnell speculated that maybe the problem had less to do with him and more to do with the fact that Americans have just gotten far crueler and more spiteful in the past few years.

My Night at Maud's (1969)

You know people who say they're "spiritual" but not religious? Back in those days, people tended to be religious but not spiritual.

My Night at Maud's is about a devout Catholic who hangs around with his Marxist friend and his atheist friend Maud. They sit in her apartment and have a long conversation about life and love.


One thing they always make fun of on Mystery Science Theater 3000 is scenes of people traveling by car. They think you should just cut to where ever it is they were going. The audience will figure out that that they drove there.

That didn't work in one movie, The Detective with Frank Sinatra in the title role. I had no idea how his character got anywhere. Did he drive himself? How was he at finding his way around and coping with traffic? And what was the parking situation in New York?

One of Eric Rohmer's trademarks was he would show people driving. With this movie, so much of it was long conversations in a couple of apartments, showing the guy driving really helped. It gave it a sense of location. If it were just scenes in people's apartments, they might have filmed it anywhere.

Rohmer's known for long conversations in his movies, but they did get out of the house more than I'm letting on. The movie even had weather in it. It was snowing. I watched it because it was a Christmas movie.


They talked philosophy at one point. They talked about Pascal's wager. I googled it. Part of it was, Pascal argued that it doesn't cost you anything to believe in God, on the off chance that God does exist, you could get eternal life out of the deal, so you may as well be a believer. He doesn't mention tithing or church-going. And the movie goes on to show that religious belief can have a negative affect on your life.

But it dawned on me that that I should start buying lottery tickets again. If I don't win, the cost of losing is minimal and if I win it would be really, really great. There are people who dismiss lottery players as mathematically inept, but Pascal had a formula for it.

I don't know what this stuff means, but it looks mathematical.

Of course, the Catholic guy in the movie said he didn't like Pascal's thing for this reason, talking about religious belief like he was playing the lottery. I don't know that religious belief is entirely voluntary anyway. You can't make yourself believe or completely drive it out of your head if you were ever a believer.

The Marxist guy, by the way, related it to a quote from Lenin about the Russian Revolution.


It was a horrible, horrible time. Even Marxist college professors wore suits and ties just to hang around with their friends. They make the Catholic guy out to be some kind of prude because he won't lie in bed with Maud, but I don't think I would either wearing a suit. In America, there were public service announcements warning people not to smoke in bed, something the French were apparently oblivious to. They didn't wear seat belts and at one point the guy was driving in the snow like it was dry pavement.

Another masked singer

I don't keep up with this at all, but it seems there's another one of those singing shows on TV, but on this one, the singers wear masks.

David Soul did this years ago on the Merv Griffin show. He said that he did it because he wanted people to judge his singing on its own merits, not because he was really, really good-looking. At least he didn't do it out of false modesty.

This is the price one pays for being good-looking. You forget and say things that make you sound like a jerk. Teen Joseph Gordon-Levitt told a reporter that he wanted his band to be judged for their music, not for being adorable.

I don't know if Finn Wolfhard has managed to avoid this pitfall.

Buffalo Boys (2018)

I saw this on a list of worst movies of the year, but articles like that are always stupid. How could anyone know what the best or worst movies are? In this case, it's a Singaporean-Indonesian co-production. How do you judge without taking into account cultural differences? I doubt it could have been successful in the West without failing in the East.

It was an anti-colonialist martial arts western. They corrected all the things I keep complaining about in westerns. They used far more interesting locations, they were anti-colonialist which is pretty much the opposite of American westerns. The actors were better-looking. I always hated the fist fights in American westerns. But long martial arts battles don't seem plausible, they might have toned down the torture and executions and the storyline could have had a bit more structure to it.



I'll never be satisfied. Probably because I never liked westerns in the first place. There were so many of them on TV when I was a kid, and there were all the movies, and I never saw their appeal. I find myself weirdly drawn to them now, but what do I want from them?

Cats - I haven't seen it, but I read a review

I haven't seen Cats in any form and I don't intend to. Don't like musicals. I'm okay with actual cats except there are some, if you pet them, that become overly friendly and excited and try climbing up your leg with their claws. It's very sad because they only want affection but you're afraid to go near them.

I just read the review of the movie Cats on the Variety website. They didn't like it, of course. The critic was an admirer of the play.

Directed by the guy who directed The King's Speech. Steven Spielberg is executive producer, so that's one more reason to hate it.

The review also brought up the issue of "furries", people who somehow attain sexual gratification by dressing in animal costumes. It was something, the critic said, that producers of the movie hadn't grappled with although I'm not sure what they should do about that.

I don't know why anyone would do this.

I was just reading an article I saved on my computer about high school plays in Seattle. It seems that high schools there are spending vast amounts--$100 thousand in one case--putting on these terrible musicals. One had a giant turntable and working elevator as part of the set. Some hire professional musicians and choreographers.

Nationwide, school plays normally cost less than $10,000, but in another Seattle high school, the Black kids had less than a thousand dollars for their play.

But you look at these high school plays and all I think about is the poor kids who want to be actors so they can kill people in movies, but instead are forced to sing and dance on stage, which seems horrifying. The potential for humiliation is astounding.

I don't know how humiliating this cat movie will be. Maybe I will watch it just to see. It was reported that the thing cost $300 million, but now they're claiming it was "only" $95 million.

Adam Driver walks off NPR interview

I don't know how I feel about Terry Gross on public radio's Fresh Air. I used to listen to it all the time, then I stopped and now when I try to listen to it, I can't stand it.

I began to suspect there was something wrong with Gross when she was interviewing someone about the one-sided slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and she seemed to think that Israel only wanted peace but the Palestinians were too anti-Semitic. There were accusations of racism against Gross. She was interviewing someone about the large numbers of rapes committed in South Africa and was astonished to learn that white men were among the perpetrators. She interviewed a Black music mogul who had worked his way up from abject poverty and kept questioning him about his selling drugs when he was in high school.

So, anyway, here's something from an essay by Curtis White, a professor at Illinois State U., about what he calls "the middle mind". He expanded it into a book that's kind of interesting which includes at attack on Steven Spielberg. I copied an pasted the quote from an article about it on another website:

Let’s think about Terry Gross and Fresh Air for just a moment. Here is an interview program that claims quite earnestly to be for intelligence, for the fresh and new, for something other than regular stale network culture, for the arts and for artists. But anyone who much listens to the show knows (I certainly hope that I’m not the only one who has noticed) that: 1) Terry rarely interviews an artist or intellectual that real-deal artists and intellectuals would recognize. 2) She has no capacity for even the grossest distinctions between artists and utter poseurs. Many of the “writers” she has interviewed recently have been writers for TV series and movies. People who can with a straight face say, “Seinfeld is a great show because of the brilliant script writing” love Fresh Air. Now, Seinfeld may be a cut above the average sit-com, but it’s a sit-com! 3) The show is a pornographic farce.

Let me develop this last idea about the pornographic a bit. Terry Gross’s interest in books and writers is too often morbid, perverse and voyeuristic. Two quick examples: she recently interviewed the main writer of the new HBO series Six Feet Under. The critical moment in the interview came when she asked him (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “What was it like when you were in that car accident and your sister was driving and she died but you didn’t?” Was she leading up to a telling psychological reading of the work in question? No. She wanted to know and I suspect her audience wanted to know what it was like to be in an auto accident in which his sister died! That’s it. Do we learn something about writing, or the arts, or culture? Do we learn anything? No, we learn that he was traumatized by the event.

As to what the folks who go on this show are thinking, knowing they’ll face this kind of personal inquisition, I won’t speculate. They’re probably thinking either, “Fresh Air! The big time!” Or “Good grief, that woman is an idiot. But my publicist will shoot me if I don’t do it.”

A week or so later there was a program in which Terry interviewed an author who had written a novel in which a woman says, “Drop dead,” to her husband and the next day he does drop dead. Before the novel was published, the author’s own real-life husband dropped dead on a tennis court. This was the point at which the book became interesting for Terry. If her poor husband hadn’t dropped dead, Terry would never have been interested in her or her book for this Show of Shows. “What did it feel like to suspect you’d killed your own husband with your art?” Fresh Air? How about Lurid Speculations? It’s like Dr. Laura for people with bachelor degrees. Car Talk has more intellectual content.

From the perspective of a person really interested in art and culture, one can only say, “Well, I think she’s on my side, but, God, she’s so stupidly on my side that I hardly recognize my side as my side.” Thus the Middle Mind.

I bring this up because an actor of sorts called Adam Driver stomped out of a Fresh Air interview because Terry Gross played a clip from one of his movies. He can't be that good an actor since he's in a Star Wars movie.

I wouldn't want to hear myself, either, and it would really make you self-conscious about the sound of your voice in an interview.

It's like the old days when you'd be hanging around with friends and you were having a perfectly pleasant time, then someone gets out a Polaroid camera, takes a picture and you're reminded what you look like.

I saw video of Woody Allen being interviewed by Mark Cousins. Allen doesn't watch his own movies and averted his eyes when Cousins played a clip.

So I don't know whose side I'm on in the Fresh Air-Adam Driver case.

It's like the time long ago. Someone asked me whose side I was on in the Falklands War. I said Argentina. Then the guy attacked me for taking sides at all in a war between two horrible capitalist countries although even those of us who took sides recognized the problem.

The war did bring down the Argentine dictatorship and the cast of BBC's Top Gear later had to run for their lives when they filmed in Argentina. Maybe there will be some silver lining to this Fresh Air thing, too.

Barron Trump movie not being made

Apparently someone wrote a script about Barron Trump trying to sabotage his father's 2016 campaign. Seems like the movie would have to show Barron's efforts backfiring. The whole thing was one big backfire. The DNC wanted Trump as the Republican nominee. They called on the press to take him seriously because they thought he was the only one Hillary Clinton could possibly beat, and they kept thinking this even as he effortlessly crushed each of his Republican rivals.

No one will produce the script though.


When I was in grade school, we had one of those reading books. It had a story in it about some backward mountain people who look at their newborn baby.

He's such a li'l bit, said the mother.

Why, that's a great name for him! said the father. We'll name him Lil Bit!

Lil Bit continues to be small for his age. He is mocked and ridiculed until one day, his school bus crashes into a ravine and he's the only small enough to crawl out a window and run for help.

It was part of a whole genre of children's stories where a kid is mocked for some attribute which ends up saving everyone. 

In reality, there's a child actor somewhere being beaten up at school and rejected for role after role because he looks like Barron Trump. This movie could be his salvation. Like Lil Bit crawling out of the overturned school bus, his resemblance to Barron Trump could turn him from an outcast into a big man.

And it could be Barron Trump's salvation. He's cute now even as an abnormally tall 13-year-old, but you know he'll turn out just like his brothers, Uday and Qusay. A movie like this could change that.

Is it worth millions of dollars making a movie on the off chance that it will make Barron Trump a non-monster? No, of course not.


I had a family member, an avid Democrat, who had a morbid hatred for Jimmy Carter's children. I think she hated 10-year-old Amy more than Chip. She was pissed off that Amy hugged her father when he was elected. She also hated Stevie Wonder because he had once been billed as "Little Stevie Wonder". But she was defensive about Chelsea Clinton, the horrible parasite who disrupted anti-war events as a student in England. Now she's married to a billionaire.

Another family member was enraged watching outtakes of the Olsen Twins. "THEY'RE BRATS!" she said because one of them had to do a retake.

I told her that all actors flub lines. One of the Olson twins smiled faintly for a second or two which I took to be a sign of slight embarrassment, but this family member said, "LOOK! SHE THINKS IT'S FUNNY!"

Dark Crimes (2016)

I didn't like Jim Carrey's beard and I somehow didn't recognize Charlotte Gainsbourg. A detective in Poland investigates a cold case which he hopes will revive his career. He goes after an abrasive eccentric writer who has published a novel that seems to be based on the case with details that were never made public.

It has 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I rather liked it. The critics took it as a failed thriller which I find a little baffling. It's like critics who judged Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog as a straight horror movie. I saw Dark Crimes as a morbid true crime art house film.

Shot in Krakow, Poland, in English by a Greek director.

Cost $4.24 million and looked pretty good. You see? Woody Allen's lowest budget movies cost at least three times that amount. In theory, he can cut way back and still do fine.

It's based in a true story which I haven't bothered learning about. I don't know if it happened in Poland or if they moved the story there to save money.

One thing they should stop doing is putting the letter R backwards on movie posters to make it look Russian. The movie is Polish, not Russian, and Polish doesn't have that letter. And in Russian, it indicates a "ya" sound.

Available on Netflix.

Onibaba (Japan, 1964)

Remember in The Seven Samurai when the villagers reveal that they have weapons and armor taken off the Samurai they've killed? I don't know why the Samurai were so upset about that. Killing people is pretty much the name of the game for them.
  
Onibaba is about a woman and her daughter-in-law who kill samurai, take their armor and weapons and trade it for food with a guy who sells it to the armies who are wrecking the country with a civil war.

After all the movies presenting samurai as invincible supermen, it's refreshing to see a couple of peasant women killing them.

I guess The Seven Samurai had it both ways. Some of the Samurai were ubermenschen and others you could kill with a rake.

According to the subtitle under the title, Onibaba means "Devil Woman", but I don't know why they would call her that. All her actions seem reasonable and moral enough, all things considered.

Yesterday

It must be a common fantasy.

There was some anthology show years ago---I don't know if it was when they brought The Twilight Zone back or if it was something else. But there was one episode where an Elvis impersonator finds himself transported back to the 1950's. I only watched the beginning and the end of the episode, but it appeared that he accidentally killed Elvis and had to take his place.

Apparently there's a movie out called Yesterday where a struggling singer songwriter finds that the world has somehow forgotten The Beatles, so he starts performing their music and hits it big.

Here's the way I would have done it:

Members of a British girl band find themselves whisked back in time to the early '60's. They struggle to adapt to this new environment. They're thrilled to meet The Beatles! They start dating them. The Beatles are known to have been wife beaters. When members of the girl band are battered by their new boyfriends, they get even by copyrighting the Beatles early songs before the Beatles have written them and then suing them for plagiarism when the Fab Four play their own compositions.

In the end, the Beatles would be working on the loading docks or whatever they have in Liverpool, ruined and humiliated, while the girls enjoy modest success stealing their music from the future.

Philip McKeon RIP

Philip McKeon has died at 55 after a long illness. He played Tommy on the sitcom Alice (1976 to 1985). Charlie Sheen once appeared with him in an episode of an anthology series and wrote a nice tweet about him.

I didn't realize his sister was Nancy McKeon from Facts of Life. In the movie, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Jodie Foster played Tommy's Peppermint Patty-like friend at one point. On the show, that would have been a perfect role for his sister.

I remember the show and I remember him well in it but my only specific memory was an episode where the women try to reassure him as he tells them in some detail all the things he doesn't like about his appearance. It was like the writers were actually trying to give him a complex.

Israeli outraged that she won't get a Golden Globe

Trying to look like a genius.

The Israeli director of Honey Boy is outraged that she didn't get a Golden Globe nomination for the Shia LaBeouf vanity project. She attacked the Golden Globes for having nominated so few women directors. She wasn't the first to suggest they have an award for "Best Director-Female" award, and it might be a good idea. But the main reason so few women get nominated is that so few women direct movies. The BBC just took a survey of movie critics to make a list of the hundred greatest movies directed by women, and the list wasn't very good. It included Fast Time at Ridgemont High, Big, Sleepless in Seattle, a couple of B movies by Ida Lupino, Desperately Seeking Susan----I guess those movies were reasonably good, but not brilliant.

I'd be happier if directing wasn't so male-dominated. It'd be fine with me if they legally required that fifty percent of movies be directed by women.

The only woman to win a Golden Globe for best director was Barbra Streisand for her ridiculous movie, Yentl.  Her fans were outraged that she didn't get an Oscar nomination. The thing was well-made but the directing was nothing special and the story was absurd. The movie didn't make it onto the BBC's list.

The story about the Israeli was reported in Variety. There were a lot of comments on it. They weren't very good. A few people hated the movie. I myself commented that the thing being about Shia LaBeouf may have played a role in it being snubbed if it was snubbed. 

Comments on the Variety website are moderated and when I looked again, they were all gone. Even my insightful observation was callously deleted. There was one new comment:

Valid criticism. But I wish all these people who decry the snubbing of women directors would go one step further and explain who among the nominees should be bumped off. Now THAT takes guts and further the conversation. 

And even if that happens, there are only 5 spots and SO MANY great films this year, there WILL be outcry over who got in and who didn’t anyway.

Long ago, when Barbra Streisand's second movie failed to get her an Oscar nomination, her fans were again in a state of rage. Why did they keep robbing her? Gene Siskel pointed out that all the movies that were nominated were far better than Streisand's and suggested that her fans say which one they thought didn't deserve the nomination.

Try not to look like an idiot on TV

I thought those guys would get arrested for sure.

There was a murder here about twenty years ago. The victim was in his 20's and shared a house with several friends who were long haired---I don't know if they were goths, exactly. But they called the TV station to send a camera crew out. This probably wasn't a wise move when they were potential suspects in an unsolved murder. The obviously fake sobbing didn't help. It was like they had never seen anyone on TV talk about someone's death before. 

I assumed they were the murderers, but police arrested someone else later.

Another time, there was a live report on local TV. Police had surrounded a house. A young man inside had written a suicide note, stuck it to the front door with a knife and began firing a .22 rifle out the window. His roommates appeared outside. They were smiling and laughing as they told reporters that they had been off somewhere when they turned on a TV, saw the stand-off, and realized it was their house! Their friend was inside going through a psychotic breakdown and was about to kill himself, and they thought the shooting and the SWAT team gave it a carnival atmosphere. 

They were just on TV for a few seconds on the 5 o'clock news. I thought I recognized one of them. He looked like a guy a knew slightly, a "friend" of a friend. He was truly the dumbest person I've ever met so it would have been completely in character.

I called a friend.

"I think I just saw John ________ on the news!" I told him to watch the news at 11:00.

Later he called me and said, no, it looked like him but it wasn't him.

That was at least thirty years ago. I'm sure those guys have lived it down by now. 

I googled John ________ and found he had died a few years ago. I was shocked that he had been a successful news photographer. He died of a heart attack while on assignment in Southeast Asia. 

Ron Leibman, RIP

Ron Leibman has died at 82. I remember him mostly from The Hot Rock and as a union organizer in Norma Rae. There are other things I know I saw him in.

When I was a eleven, my brother and I turned on a made-for-TV movie he starred in called The Super Cops. It was directed by Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree, Shaft, Shaft's Big Score!) but our sister came home and demanded to know what we were watching. We told her.

"THAT SOUNDS STUPID," she said.

So we turned it off.
 
I quit telling people the titles of what I watch after that. To this day, if anyone asks, I say, "It's a movie" or "It's a TV show." If they press for information, I'll tell them the genre and if they want to know more, I might name an actor, the director or something about the source material. I must really annoy people.

My sister herself has terrible taste in movies. Off hand I can name a few she dragged the family to see: Somebody Killed Her Husband (starring Farrah Fawcett-Majors who she hated), It Could Happen to You (lottery jackpot movie), Picture Perfect (a stalker demands to marry a woman he doesn't know and, in the end, she actually does, and this was supposed to be romantic) The Nude Bomb (a Get Smart movie). Those were movies she had already seen that she demanded we all go see.

I'm still amazed that she demanded we all go to the drive-in to see Arnold.

One of the worst movies of 2019

Loqueesha. My God.

First I should admit that I didn't watch it to the end.

I looked at a list of the worst movies of 2019. This was the first one I found that I could watch free on Roku.

Self-financed by the writer/director/star Jeremy Saville. I couldn't find how much it cost him, but he made another "comedy" for an estimated $100,000.

This one is about a white bartender who gives terribly good advice to the drunks in his bar, so he applies to host a local radio call-in show. He doesn't get the job. He's never worked in radio and nothing qualifies him to do so, but he naturally assumes he was discriminated against for being white. So he sends in a tape where he impersonates a Black woman in a most offensive manner. He gets the job and becomes highly successful even though he says "fuck" on the radio.

There were commenters defending the movie online. They all seemed to be racist whites who were outraged that anyone would dare notice it was racist. They didn't show any sign that they especially liked it except for the racism.

Visually, it looked cheap but passable. The actors all had other credits on IMDb. Even the kid in it had been in some TV shows. You can do okay for $100,000 if that's what it cost.

Nothing funny in it that I saw. Had repeated scenes of people enthusing over the guy's advice.

I think the lesson here is, don't make movies that are disgusting and not funny.

Prince Charles attempted incest

Did you know that Lord Mountbatten tried to get Prince Charles to marry his (Charles') cousin who was Mountbatten's granddaughter? Mountbatten had been conniving for years to get his wing of the royal family back on top. Charles actually proposed to her but the horrified girl turned him down.

That was one thing that stood out in my mind. I watched a British documentary series about the Royal Family on Netflix. They took it pretty easy on Andrew considering everything.

British TV shows often have only six episodes per season. I guess that's good. They can have more shows that way. More people can experience the thrill of being a TV star. I assume they don't just re-run the same six episodes all year.

So after watching the British documentary series, I tried to find something in a similar vein. I turned on a show called The Windsors which turned out to be a cruel sit-com about the British royal family. The actors didn't look that much like the royals they were playing. I don't think I would have recognized the one as Princess Anne if I hadn't watched the documentaries first, so the two series did complement each other.

Dirty Dancing documentary

I was on Skype talking to a friend in the very heart of Russia. She was getting ready for a holiday and had made some borscht. She wasn't sure how to explain what it was. I told her I knew---we call it borscht here, too. We don't really eat it, but the name is the same. We even had a Borscht Belt, I told her,  a series of resorts in the Catskill Mountains. Jews were barred from hotels and resorts, so they opened their own. I mentioned that the movie Dirty Dancing was set in the Borscht Belt. Then I was afraid that she would think I was recommending the movie and would think I was an idiot suggesting it, so I told her it was terrible, so don't watch it.

She told me she had seen it several times and liked it. I was embarrassed.

I had seen Dirty Dancing on TV years ago because one of my elderly relatives wanted to see it after it was recommended to her by a younger relatives. After talking to my friend, I turned it on again, and there were the '60's cars and the clothes and the setting---if the movie were Russian and set in the Soviet Union I would have been fascinated by it.

I just watched a documentary on Netflix about the making of Dirty Dancing. The woman who wrote the script was called "Baby" like the girl in the movie, her father was a doctor and they went to resorts in the Catskills like in the movie, and she and the other young people would hang around and they would do what they called "dirty dancing" and she was terribly good at it.

The director had won an Oscar for a documentary short. He had never done a feature film before. The short film had been about dancing, and that was how he happened to know that Patrick Swayze was a dancer---he left that off his resume because he also had a painful knee injury that kept him from doing it.

Swayze and Jennifer Grey had been in the movie Red Dawn together and she couldn't stand him, but he talked to her privately and she agreed to do  the movie. I should tell my Russian friend that. America's morbid, paranoid hatred of her country almost derailed a dance movie.

It's like every movie. They're so difficult to make, everyone involved in the production takes it more seriously than you would imagine.

It was bankrolled by Vestron which had raked in a fortune on home video. At the time, the studios just began to realize that there was money in videotape, so they started doing it themselves and Vestron had to start making their own movies. It was a low budget. They couldn't film in the summer so they had to film it in a resort in the South. Very short schedule. The director being a documentary guy meant he knew to keep the camera rolling to catch spontaneous moments like the girl annoying Patrick Swayze by laughing and ruining take after take.

The documentary talked about Swayze's death at 57 but didn't mention Jennifer Grey wrecking her career with an ill-advised nose job.

I don't know. It still seems stupid, but probably no more than most other movies. It was kind of a lady's film, so I hope that my disdain isn't sexist.

Former Axis anti-war movies

Fires on the Plain I guess was anti-war. The focus was entirely on Japanese suffering. I suppose that makes sense if you're trying to convince the Japanese that war is bad. It actually made the war look pretty good from the American side. The Japanese watched American troops drive by in trucks. Some were wasting ammunition shooting randomly. They marveled at how well-fed the Americans looked and how they must have had boundless supplies. A couple of Filipino villagers were dressed like middle class people and looked healthy and happy.

It might put some of the American anti-war movies into a new light. Millions died in Vietnam but these movies present American soldiers as the REAL victims. If you're pro-war, you obviously have a depraved indifference to the suffering of people in other countries, so if the purpose of the film was to make you turn anti-war, I guess it would make sense. But I doubt many Vietnam War fans went to see Coming Home.

There was that German movie, The Bridge, which was West Germany's first supposedly anti-war movie. It was made in 1959. It took the "former" Nazis fourteen years to decide that World War Two might have been a bad thing. It even made basic training look pretty good. Everyone was pleasant, the Nazis wanted to keep the new recruits out of danger and gave them a nice easy job, guarding a bridge. In a way it was more like Red Dawn than anything else, where the untrained teenagers defeat experienced soldiers. The only thing anti-war about it was that some of the teenage Nazis blubbed during the battle because it wasn't as fun as they thought it would be.

Fires on the Plain (1959)

My brother was performing in Okinawa. He went on a tour of caves on the island where Japanese troops took refuge from U.S. bombing and shelling in preparation for the invasion of Okinawa during World War Two. A young Japanese woman led the tour. She suddenly announced they needed to leave and she hurried them out. My brother found the cave really creepy anyway, and he said that the guide told them afterward that she saw the ghost of Japanese soldier.

Apparently even the Japanese find World War Two Japanese soldiers scary. I don't know why. I think they had one of the least scary uniforms in the war.

I watched Fires on the Plain (Japan, 1959) directed by Kon Ichikawa. A bleak anti-war film. It makes a monkey out of Saving Private Ryan (if you take Spielberg's movie to be anti-war) and does so without gore effects.

I had seen it a couple of times in the 1970's and '80's. At the time, I took the cannibalism to be symbolic, but you might watch the Japanese documentary, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987) for more information on that.

Fires on the Plain is about a soldier with tuberculosis. His company has been reduced to the size of a platoon and he's of no help to them, so they keep sending him to what passes for an Army hospital. The "doctor" tells him that if he can walk, he's too healthy to be there, so they send him back. His sergeant gives him a grenade and orders him to blow himself up if the hospital won't take him.

The Japanese soldiers all look terrible. They're malnourished. The actors were given little to eat and weren't allowed to brush their teeth. In you ran into one in a cave, you'd be terrified. 

Sleeping Tiger (Joseph Losey, UK, 1954)

I sat through an awful movie, one of four movies Joseph Losey directed in Britain either without credit or under an assumed name. It was Sleeping Tiger which was one of three movies he directed with Dirk Bogarde.

I watched it because it sounded a bit lurid. A psychology professor takes a gun away from a mugger played by Bogarde and forces him to stay at his house with his wife and servant so he can cure him of his criminal tendencies. The guy starts running around with the professor's wife.

I prefer to think that Losey, a blacklisted American director who took refuge in Britain, had no control over the content of this thing---he was just hired to direct the lousy script.

The psychotherapy scenes weren't interesting or convincing. I thought it might be a little more like Boudo Saved From Drowing but Bogarde was just a jerk until he's cured by a sudden revelation.

I assumed the doctor would kill Bogarde at the end, but the movie was more optimistic than I was about curing criminals with psychotherapy. The thing was a bit stagey most of it taking place in the house. The scenes shot out on the streets at night looked like kind of a dumpy version of a picturesque British town.

Losey's career really got going later. There were a couple of movies he made in the '70's, The Go-Between and Mr Klein, that they screened at the university when I was in high school.

The Boy with the Green Hair with Dean Stockwell in the title role helped get him targeted by HUAC and I rather liked the odd Hammer horror sci fi movie, These are the Damned (1962) with Oliver Reed as a violent Teddy Boy. I saw it in the middle of the night on TV and spent years trying to find it again.

I assume those are English musicians trying to sound American. The tables would turn in a few years and Americans would try to sound like the Beatles.

BBC's top hundred movies directed by women

The BBC polled film critics and it may just be that they're as dumb as the rest of us. I know there aren't many women directors, but it's worse than I thought when Big, Sleepless in Seattle and Fast Times at Ridgemont High make it onto the top 100 list of movies directed by women.

Remember when Barbra Streisand fans were outraged that she didn't get an Oscar for Yentl? Nothing she directed made the list.

Agnes Varda passed away this year. Some of the streaming channels focused in her movies which may be part of the reason why she's as prominent on the list as she is.

I heard it suggested that directing is so male-dominated that we should stop focusing on directors. They're not ALL auteurs. George Lucas's wife was the editor who saved Star Wars from her husband's incompetence and people suspected that Peter Bogdanovich's ex-wife Polly Platt was responsible for any of his successes. Those "New Hollywood" guys were terrible sexists who thought their wives should give up their careers to be their helpmeets.

I was just thinking about Harlan County, USA, a few minutes before I came across the list, and last night I tried watching another Czech New Wave movie from the '60's or '70's and thought about how much I disliked Daisies, 

For some reason I put the ones I've seen in bold, but I can't imagine it's of any interest to anyone but me. Some of those things I watched thirty years ago just because they were on TV or I got dragged off to them or someone else wanted to watch them on TV. Please don't judge me too harshly.


100. The Kids are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010)
99. The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019)
98. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2010)
97. Adoption (Márta Mészáros, 1975)
96. The Meetings of Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1977)
95. Ritual in Transfigured Time (Maya Deren, 1946)
94. News From Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977)
93. Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006)
92. Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016)
91. White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)
90. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)
89. The Beaches of Agnes (Agnès Varda, 2008)
88. The Silences of the Palace (Moufida Tlatli, 1994)
87. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)
86. Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2012)
85. One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (Agnès Varda, 1977)
84. Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967)
83. Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993)
82. At Land (Maya Deren, 1944)
81. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)
80. Big (Penny Marshall, 1988)
79. Shoes (Lois Weber, 1916)
78. The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998)
77. Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011)
76. Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, 2014)
75. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)
74. Chocolat (Claire Denis, 1988)
73. On Body and Soul (Ildikó Enyedi, 2017)
72. Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland, 1980)
71. The Seashell and the Clergyman (Germaine Dulac, 1928)
70. Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002)
69. The Connection (Shirley Clarke, 1961)
68. Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997)
67. The German Sisters (Margarethe von Trotta, 1981)
66. Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999)
65. Leave no Trace (Debra Granik, 2018)
64. The Rider (Chloe Zhao, 2017)
63. Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006)
62. Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)
61. India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975)
60. A League of their Own (Penny Marshall, 1992)
59. The Long Farewell (Kira Muratova, 1971)
58. Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985)
57. The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014)
56. 13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016)
55. Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003)
54. Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)
53. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
52. Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018)
51. Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976)
50. Outrage (Ida Lupino, 1950)
49. Salaam Bombay! (Mira Nair, 1988)
48. The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova, 1989)
47. An Angel at my Table (Jane Campion, 1990)
46. Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)
45. Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)
44. American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016)
43. The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)
42. The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926)
41. Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, 2018)
40. Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999)
39. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)
38. Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990)
37. Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938)
36. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
35. The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999)
34. Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)
33. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay, 2017)
32. The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)
31. The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000)
30. Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)
29. Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair, 2001)
28. Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965)
27. Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014)
26. Stories we Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
25. The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963)
24. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017)
23. The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)
23. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)
21. Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010)
20. Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995)
19. Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992)
18. American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000)
17. Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmüller, 1975)
16. Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)
15. The Swamp (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)
14. Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)
13. Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)
12. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)
11. The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)
10. Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)
9. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
8. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)
7. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)
6. Daisies (Věra Chytilová, 1966)
5. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
4. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
3. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
2. Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
1. The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)

E.T. was an objectively bad movie

I wrote my ET anecdote in the last entry. Then I looked at the news this morning and it turns out that Comcast made a two minute commercial using the hideous space alien and a now middle aged Elliott (ElliotT--get it?)

In the movie, ET had latched onto Elliott and was keeping himself alive by sucking the life force out of him. He was murdering Elliott. That's why Elliott and ET were both dying. Elliott's entire family could have been wiped out and it wouldn't have affected his health---why would he be on the brink of death because he loved his new space alien friend so much?

If they really wanted to capture the flavor of the original movie, ET would keep revealing new super powers even if they made no sense. If he could fly, why didn't he do that in the first place?

I have to be careful who I say this to. I have a six-year-old neighbor who was named after Elliott, even though, in the movie, Elliott's parents were divorced and his father long gone.

The Irishman

It's like the time my sister forced us all to watch E.T. She had seen it and thought it was the most deeply moving experience of her life. When it was over, she asked my brother what he thought.

"It's just like all those other movies," he said.

Which is how I feel sitting here with The Irishman on Netflix.

It's just like all those other movies.

I don't think the digital de-aging was that bad, but why not just hire younger actors? Give someone else a turn.

The Fugitive being remade

I never liked The Fugitive, the TV show or the movie. It was one of those shows where a guy travels from place and place and helps people with their problems. The movie with Harrison Ford had to skip all that and just remade the pilot and the series finale. He escapes from the train taking him to prison and -- SPOILER ALERT -- finds the real killer.

Now they're doing a remake.

If they want to make a movie that's REALLY based on the TV show, they'll skip the origin story and have the Fugitive appear in a small Peyton Place-like town where he begins helping everyone solve their emotional problems. That way, they can do sequels.

In fact, instead of an escaped surgeon, he should be a psychiatrist who's been wrongly convicted of killing his wife. And to ease the main character's psychic pain, they should make it clear that his wife was a horrible person and that he's better off without her even if he has to be a fugitive.

The origin story isn't that interesting. They could cover it during the opening credits, or not even that. Just state it on the movie poster. People can read it on the way in.

But it sounds like the only thing they're going to do different is make Dr Richard Kimble an African-American.

Ryan Reynolds, Fifteen

I still haven't seen Ryan Reynolds in anything but the teenage soap opera Fifteen, the least operatic soap opera imaginable. It was a weekly show on Canadian TV and on Nickelodeon.

The main things I remember about him---there was the time his character was kicked out of a band because of his poor drumming, and an episode where he says, "Go ahead! Hit me! If it'll make you feel like a BIG MAN!"

Much like Saddam Hussein's last words. The group gathered to witness his execution were a rather vocal in their approval. "Do you feel like men?" Hussein shouted. Made up a little for his pitiful surrender.

Hussein's tween grandson picked up an AK47 and started shooting when Uday and Qusay were killed. The poor boy was killed immediately, but he didn't come crawling out of his spider hole begging them not to shoot like his grandfather did.

But I'm way off the subject.

Fifteen was awful, but it could have used elements of its awfulness to it's advantage.

There was an episode where a kid who had never shown any sign that there was anything wrong with him announces that he's going into treatment for alcoholism. He talks blandly about his shame at being an alcoholic.

"Now that I'm an alcoholic..."

It was so easy. That axiom writers keep spouting---"Show don't tell"----meant nothing. They could have effortlessly done anything, any crazy plot twist, just by having a kid say it.

"A therapist convinced me I had repressed memories of satanic abuse, so I falsely accused my parents. Now my Mom is in a prison gang and wants to get even with me. And it turns out my foster parents really are Satanists but no one will believe me. Sort of a boy who cried wolf thing."

But I don't remember any conflict or drama. I saw one kid from the show later in a TV docudrama about Amy Fisher and I saw on IMDb.com that a few of the kids went on to bigger things on Canadian TV, but nothing came of it for most of them, poor devils.

I just googled it. Season One is available on Amazon Prime.

Dragnet vs Trackdown

It's weird how influential Dragnet was in the 1950's. Even TV westerns tried to be Dragnet-like. One such show was Trackdown starring Robert Culp as a Texas Ranger. The title and theme music were vaguely Dragnet-like. There was also a show called 26 Men based on real cases of the Arizona Rangers.

The trouble was that Dragnet was a police procedural and people in the Old West didn't have any procedures to follow. It would be like a medical drama set in the Old West. They didn't know enough for it to be of any interest.

Westerns are about ignorant people with guns who follow a simplistic moral code that they still can't understand or explain.

I watched an episode of Trackdown over the weekend. Robert Culp tries to arrest a guy who appears to be trying to break into a hotel room. The guy tries to flee. He's clearly unarmed and is trying to climb out a window, so Robert Culp shoots him. And apparently this wouldn't be a problem except it turns out to be young teenager he just killed.

The town turns against him. The narrator explains that the townspeople forgot all the times Robert Culp killed people who WEREN'T high school kids.

It doesn't really make sense, but he is somehow proven right when it turns out that the kid's father had been the criminal robbing people and the young fellow was trying to get his loot, maybe to return it, I guess. The boy's mother kills his father because she blames him for her son being killed, which also doesn't make complete sense.

In the end, the woman who runs the town newspaper (Ellen Corby) assures Robert Culp that, in a week or two, the town will forget all about him shooting a helpless unarmed teenager in the back.

Hunter Biden's a terrible degenerate

DNA has reportedly proved that Hunter Biden fathered a child in Arkansas while he was still sleeping with his dead brother's widow. In May, he secretly married a woman he'd known for week.

As I've said before, I think it's a Cain and Abel thing. Joe Biden carried on and on about his dead son, Beau---how he was the finest human being he had ever known, how he exemplified his own finest qualities and how he would make a great president one day. And there was Hunter Biden, the drug addict, listening to all this. THAT'S what made him go after his dead brother's wife.

"NOW who's the better man!" Hunter Biden probably thought.

Hunter Biden married South African Melissa Cohen ten days after they met. The have matching Hebrew tattoos. Biden's wife divorced him in part because he spent large sums of money on drugs, prostitutes and gifts for his lady friends.

“Thank you for giving my son the courage to love again,” Joseph Biden told Cohen.


There's no telling how soon they'll get divorced.

Surely Hunter Biden knows he's not helping his father's campaign.

"I got married because I thought it would help you!" Hunter will no doubt tell his father.

"How would it help me to have you marry a stranger?"

Then, in another week:

"Well, I divorced Melissa like you wanted!"

"You WHAT?"

And a week after that:

"You got nothing more to worry about! I took care of EVERYTHING!"

"What do you mean?"

"I got married again! That's what you wanted, isn't it?"

"Married to whom?"

"Doris."

"What's her last name?"

"Biden, of course."

"What was her last name before you married her?"

"I'm not sure."

Old Charlie's Angels

I was sitting here with Charlie's Angels, the old '70's TV series on. It was so bad. So very, very bad. 

I read somewhere that film schools focused on the wrong things. The writing, the acting and the music were more important than the directing.  I wonder if that's true. The show was so poorly made, would better music have helped? Maybe better or more idiosyncratic content would have compensated for the terrible form.

In this show, the girls were driving around in Ford Pintos and Mustang II's, and Bosley was driving one of those enormous Ford's.

Just better cars would have been a vast improvement. Emma Peel drove a Lotus Elan on The Avengers. Mazda later based the Miata on the Elan.

And Bosley---it wasn't his fault, but he was terrible. 1970's clothing was too tight. It looked uncomfortable and if you were the least bit overweight it looked REALLY uncomfortable. Bosley would have been better wearing comfortable clothing made from natural fibers and driving a midsize car he could easily park or turn around in. And if he were a different person. 

They put no thought into anything. They all had snub-nosed .38's. They could have broken that up. Given them a variety of revolvers and automatics.

And why were the women so helpless? They showed one of them learning police Jiu-Jitsu in the opening credits. They couldn't put in fake TV karate fights? Again, Emma Peel should have been their model.

I haven't watched many episodes. There was one where one of the girls goes undercover in a women's prison. The scene where she's first brought to the prison was filmed in what looked like the waiting room in a dentist office with the bad art hanging on the walls. The scene in the prison yard was filmed at a public swimming pool. You know how swimming pools have high fences topped with barbed wire so drunks won't climb over at night and drown? I guess they figured this would work well enough as a prison, but they made no effort to conceal the fact that there was a swimming pool. One of the angels gets into a cat fight with another inmate and knocks her into the water.

It was terrible, but you'd think zero budget filmmakers could show the same---well, I wouldn't call it creativity exactly. 

A 1952 murder case

There was a murder about twenty minutes down the freeway from here 67 years ago.

I had gone digging through microfilm for the local newspaper at the library. I was looking for a theater review from 1952. I didn't find it but I started reading the local news. Back then, a married woman with a baby was sentenced to sixty days in jail for drinking a beer because she was under 21, a blind couple got five years for writing bad checks, and a sixteen-year-old boy got six months for vagrancy.

I was shocked at how expensive things were. A clock radio cost $50 ($485 today). I looked at the classified ads. A lot of people lived in single rooms and, adjusting for inflation, rent wasn't cheap even in a small city.

I guess gas wasn't all that cheap then. There were ads for a brand of English car I never heard of and its only selling point was gas mileage.

At the university, frat-boys staged a failed panty raid, but it inspired a charity clothing drive.

And a 15-year-old was the youngest person in state history at the time to be charged with first degree murder. His name was Elmer.

I read the news that Elmer was found guilty of the crime first. It disturbed me because law enforcement and juvenile justice must have been terrible back then. I wondered if he really did it. So I looked at the newspapers from several days earlier and read about the trial.

The victim was an 18-year-old girl named Mary. She lived on a farm near the defendant's home. She was deaf and mute. She had never gone to school because of her disabilities. She was pregnant and had been shot in the back of the head with a .22 caliber pistol while she was picking flowers.

I don't know what made them suspect Elmer, but the evidence against him was that the girl was shot with a Colt Woodsman pistol that belonged to his father and footprints made by his boots were found in the mud. The boots were later found stuffed in a hollow tree trunk.

Elmer was the only defense witness at the trial. His attorney asked him a question to get him started and he told the story.

He said that he and another guy were doing some farm work, hauling something in a Model A truck. The engine quit. He started working on getting it started again. While doing this, a mean-looking old man came walking up behind him. He was startled and almost jump two feet.

Your father got any guns? the mean-looking old man asked.

Yes, sir, he does, Elmer replied.

Go get me one!

Oh, no, sir, Elmer said.  I'm not allowed to touch any of the guns.

But the old man looked really mean, so Elmer went in and got one.

Now gimme them boots! the old man said.

Elmer gave him his boots. The old man put them on. He walked off to Mary's house. Elmer saw the old man motion to Mary who was inside. She came out. They walked off. Elmer heard a shot. Then the old man came walking back. He gave Elmer the gun and told him to put it back where he got it, gave him boots back and told him to get rid of them and warned him to tell no one about it or he would kill him, too.

He said he didn't know who the old man was at the time, but now he knew that it was the victim's grandfather.

The prosecutor ripped him apart on cross examination.

Elmer was convicted. He was sentenced to life in prison. He went to regular adult prison. He would be eligible for parole in seven years and people thought he'd probably be released then.

There was an editorial in the paper after his conviction. They speculated about what would become of him in prison. "He will probably become a homosexual," it actually said.

It was probably twenty-five years ago that I read about that case. I've told a few people the story over the years. I thought it was funny how stupid this kid was, but the story just seems depressing now.

I started thinking back to it for some reason. I googled it and with some effort was able to find the old newspaper articles online.

The only new thing I found in the news about Elmer was published three years later. When he was eighteen, it was reported that he had escaped from prison. This turned out not to be the case. He was in the prison hiding in a pile of hay to avoid going to the dentist the next day. I imagine that would have kept him in prison longer.

Obviously he wasn't the brightest guy in the world.

I did some google searches. It's surprising how many people there are with the same name, but I found him. I don't know when he got out of prison, but he was living in Idaho. He died about ten years ago at 72.

I did some more searching on an ancestry site. He had two siblings who died in infancy, his grandfather was born in Kentucky and moved to Oregon and was in the Spanish-American War. His paternal grandmother died at a young age. I got the impression that his family wanted to forget he existed or at least wanted other people to forget. I found obituaries for other members of his family and he wasn't listed as one of their survivors.

According to the newspaper, his mother cried when he was convicted, but, really, did she want to take him home after that?

If you're going to have guns in the house, at least lock them up.

Mr Rogers Neighborhood

The only times I watched Mr Roger's Neighborhood was in pre-school. A couple of times they'd roll a TV in and turn it on. It started out great, with the miniature houses and the toy cars. I wanted to see more of that, but instead we have this guy changing his sweater and his shoes. The puppets were terrible.

It was no Sesame Street. Sesame Street was flashier, tried to use advertising tricks to teach phonics which probably isn't all that great either. Which was more cerebral?

I never liked Captain Kangaroo, either. I didn't like his hair and the stuff on it wasn't interesting or amusing. I guess I watched it enough that I knew they had a moose and Mr Greenjeans. They had a clown who would sweep up spotlights on the floor which was funny for about two seconds.

And then there was Art Linkletter. I watched his show only once in preschool. He was interviewing children, asking them each the same question. This must have been around 1967. He asked them, "What do your mommy and daddy hit you with?"

I'm sure this new movie about the guy is fine, though. Fred Rogers always seemed like a nice guy.

New Cats musical cost $300 million

They could have made one and a half MCU movies for that!

There was a time when musicals were considered educational for some reason. Maybe they thought they were expanding the limits of your attention span by making you sit through three solid hours of that crap.  I got dragged off to see Oliver! There was The Sound of Music, of course, but I only remember seeing that on TV.

But now Cats is a motion picture. Has actors with computer generated fur. And word is that the thing cost just under $300 million.

I don't know if this formula still applies when you get into absurdly expensive movies, but in general, they have to gross two and a half times their budget just to break even. In theory, this thing will have to gross $750 million or it will lose money. Nothing on Broadway is THAT popular.

What is it about, anyway? Does it have a plot of any kind?

It's something comic book fans can wave in your face next time anyone brings up the vast sums thrown away on idiotic superhero movies. They should start working out carefully crafted arguments now.

For those making the case against comic book movies, when their fans bring up Cats, just say, "That's whataboutism!"

Polanski movie doing pretty well in France

I don't know what this means or to whom this is some kind of victory, but Roman Polanski's movie, An Officer and a Spy, is doing pretty well in France in spite of the accusation that Polanski raped an 18-year-old actress in France in 1975. The gross is between $8.7 and $11 million. They've sold

I don't know how big the French market is or how most French movies do there. I don't know if doing well in France is enough. Maybe the French are more open-minded, or maybe there's not much else to watch, or maybe movies in general don't perform especially well there.

From Variety:

Ticket sales for “An Officer and a Spy” grew over the weekend. Eric Marti, general manager for Comscore France, said the uptick was a sign that the film is enjoying strong word-of-mouth and will likely continue to perform well in the weeks to come.

“‘An Officer and a Spy’ has enough legs to sell between 1.2 million to 1.5 million admissions (and gross between $8.7 million to $11 million) in France, slightly more than Polanski’s 2010 film ‘The Ghost Writer,'” Comscore said.

But Marti said the film would have done substantially better without the controversy surrounding Polanski, whom former actor Valentine Monnier recently accused of raping her in 1975, when she was 18.

Polanski's Pirates was his biggest hit in France selling two million tickets. It was in English like a lot of Polanski movies, but the French are open to dubbing.

I just saw a dubbed movie on Netflix. I don't know what it was and I didn't watch it all. But I'm tired of reading subtitles. I want to watch movies on TV like it's TV, so you can watch it while sitting on the computer, reading a magazine, doing some housework or whatever else people do with the TV on. I don't want to have to sit there with my eyes glued to the set so I don't miss what's going on. The dubbed version was fine.

Now, there was Luc Moullet's New Wave French western A Girl is a Gun. Perhaps getting into the spirit of bad dubbing, Jean-Pierre Leaud's dialogue was dubbed in a deep voice that was nothing like his. And I've seen dubbed foreign films where thirteen-year-old boys sound like middle-aged cigarette smoking alcoholics. But this thing I saw, whatever it was, was great. I wasn't used to seeing stuff dubbed so it took me a second to realize it was even through they weren't that careful matching up the syllables. Which is good.

I saw this old Italian crime movie. It was awful. But judging from the opening credits, one of the three stars was an American and was presumably speaking English, so I watched their mouths trying to tell which one was English dubbed in English, and I couldn't tell. The dubbing was so well done it could have been any of them.

Which is why I didn't trust it. I want them to translate for accuracy, not to get the syllables to match.

Back in the days before video, there were books on film making which argued passionately for dubbing. You could change lines, you could hire actors for looks and have real actors dub their voices, you could use any camera even if it wasn't normally suited for live sound, you don't have to worry about background noise and the director could talk to the actors while they film the scene.

And, really, with digital video, you'd still have those advantages and do-it-yourself dubbing would be easier now than in the old days when you had to figure out how to dub dialog without the projector noise.

Something I read

I read an attack on Jojo Rabbit. I guess it was an attack. I don't remember.

But they pointed out that, in the movie The Producers, the play "Springtime for Hitler" that becomes an unintentional hit comedy wasn't actually funny.

And now that I think back to it, what exactly were they laughing at?

The Hunting Party (1971)

I was watching an episode The Rifleman. It was directed by Don Medford.

"Who's that?" I thought.

I googled him.

Don Medford was a TV director who also directed a couple of movies one of which was The Hunting Party, a 1971 British/US co-production filmed in Spain. Oliver Reed is head of a large band of outlaws. They kidnap Candice Bergen because they think she's the schoolmarm and Oliver Reed wants her to teach him how to read. They don't say why he wants to become literate and I don't think school teachers in the Old West had any special skills back then. They knew how to read but I doubt they knew much about teaching.

Candice's wealthy impotent sadist husband (Gene Hackman) was out on a hunting trip with his business associates. He bought them each a high powered rifle with a long old-timey telescopic site that gives it a range of 800 yards. When they get word that his wife has been kidnapped, they go after them. They figure they'll find the band of outlaws and pick them off from a great distance so they can't shoot back.

The movie was lousily received. Everyone hated it. Starts with Oliver Reed and his friends cutting up a cow they killed. They eat raw meat fresh from the cow.

There's something they warn film students about. Don't use toy guns in your movies. That goes for airsoft guns and BB guns, too, although I've seen movies where people used them and they worked fine. But in this movie, the rifles with the long telescopic sites were obviously fake. They clearly didn't weigh anything. You could see that the barrels were light tubes rather than heavy gun barrels.

The gimmick with the rifles might have been better if they didn't all have one. They don't explain why Gene Hackman didn't simply kill Oliver Reed---he could have done it a couple of times but didn't bother.

There just wasn't much of a plot.

The emotionally repressed British and an American TV director tried to make their own overwrought Italian western, but it just wasn't in their nature.

You know how, in old episodes of Barnaby Jones they always tried to build up to a big dramatic conclusion and it never, ever came out anywhere near as good as they thought it would? Same thing here.