Chris Hansen four years ago

Recent mugshot of elderly adulterer Chris Hansen.

"Hmm Any more Chris Hansen news?" I thought wonderingly.

I googled it. No, nothing new. I did find this in The New Republic from 2015, though:

https://newrepublic.com/article/123138/chris-hansen-back-catching-predators

It was before Hansen's arrest, his house being foreclosed on, his wife filing for divorce, his being sued for not paying his bills, his eviction and his car being repossessed, but it hints at his being washed up, having to turn to Kickstarter for a job. 

'50's US cultural imperialism and its blowback

Teddy Boys. I think they were in the '60s, though. So called because they wore Edwardian style suits. An early attempt to parlay their enthusiasm for American youth culture into something perversely British. Photo by Stanley Kubrick.

There was a half hour NBC news show in the 1950's called Outlook which ran an episode on British teenagers and how American youth culture had taken over the country. They listened to American music. One really popular British singing sensation imitated American music. They watched Hollywood movies, wore blue jeans.

They didn't know that within ten years it would all come back on us. There'd be the British invasion, the Beatles would overwhelm everything and American bands would start singing with English accents.

At the end of World War Two, the last demand that the United States made of France before they could receive aid under the Marshall Plan was that they sacrifice their movie industry. They had to lift the limit on how many foreign films could be shown. Soon, the place was awash in Hollywood movies.

That came back on the US, too, with the French New Wave somehow being inspired by terrible American B movies.

I don't know if anything like that can happen again. American culture is like the American military---it's not very good, but they pour so many billions of dollars into it that it overwhelms everything else.

Filmmakers from other countries are taking inspiration from American movies, but no matter how good they are, can they compete with a massive ad campaign for the Tranformers?

An English critic in that NBC news show said that British movies in the '50's were imitating Hollywood movies, but they wound up with movies that weren't America, weren't British; weren't art, weren't  commercial. They didn't pull it off quite as well as the French.

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made a documentary called 10 on Ten. He had made a feature called Ten which took the form of ten conversations a woman has while driving. So in the documentary, he spoke to the camera about film and filmmaking as he drove to one of his favorite locations.

Kiarostami told a story, that he was at a film festival in France. He went to see an American movie shown to an enormous audience at a massive outdoor theater. They all watched the movie and when it was over, the crowd began booing. He thought Hollywood must have lost his touch.

But he went to another American movie at the festival and the same thing happened. It was got a huge audience, bigger than anything from any other country got, the audience sat through it and again they booed it at the end.

He noted that, in spite of the conflict Iran was in with the US, there was some tendency in Iran to imitate Hollywood.

And that was his advice to aspiring filmmakers. It was too late for him. He made arthouse films and he couldn't change now. But try to imitate Hollywood. Follow the Hollywood formula.

I'll mention one other thing...an article I read on art in China. In the West, the art world believes in formalism, that form, not content, is all that matters. Western art doesn't say anything. Chinese art tends to be political---not propaganda but dealing with issues in Chinese society. One that comes to mind was a series of portraits of old men called "We Are Bachelors", dealing with one consequence of the country having more men than women.

When westerners buy Chinese art, they go either for art that is purely decorative, or they go for art that is anti-Chinese which mainly take the form of paintings of corrupt Communist officials with naked ladies. It's the only kind of political art rich Americans go for.

And we're seeing the same thing with Iranian film. Iranian director Jafar Panahi was banned from working for a number of years after he supported the attempted government overthrow by Mousavi in 2009. Mousavi had suddenly announced that he was running for president three months before the election, he barely campaigned and only in two cities. But, before the polls had even closed, he announced that he won the election and called on his supporters to take to the streets to stop them from stealing the election from him. The western press, of course, sided with him.

So, banned from writing or directing movies for twenty years, Panahi filmed a movie in his apartment called This Is Not a Film. It was made for 3,200 euros and you wonder where the money went. It got an Oscar.

I don't know what it tells you that nothing happened to Panahi. He plainly violated the 20-year ban and went on to make another movie after that.

The west has no interest in anything coming from Iran unless it's an attack on the Iranian government. Millionaire Hollywood liberals are as dumb as the rest of us---they hate whoever the government tells them to hate.

Fiddling Horse

I've been listening to the Thought Spiral podcast religiously almost since it began. I don't know why. It gives me a feeling of inferiority that I'm not a wealthy comedian or anything else. Someone said the show was like listening to your older brother talking with his friends who all lead more interesting lives than you. I guess he's right. I've listened to my musician brothers talk with their musician friends about their profession. But then they start talking about subjects where I know more than they do and they express sometimes stupid opinions but they ignore me if I say anything. In the case of Thought Spiral, it's because it's a podcast and I have no way of interacting with them.

I usually listen to it at midnight when it first becomes available, but I've been sleep deprived and turned everything off last night. I listened to it this morning as I ate my breakfast of ramen and potstickers.

The boys, Andy Kindler and J Elvis Weinstein, were in Loiusiana after a grueling week, finishing production of the movie, The Fiddling Horse, written and directed by C.J. Wallis.

Weinstein mentioned that the movie basically had a crew of three and one of Wallis's in-laws came to help out.

Eric Rohmer over the years reportedly cut his crew down smaller and smaller until, in his last films, it was just him, a camera operator and a sound guy.

There was a documentary about Jim Wynorski filming a semi-pornographic horror movie in just three days who had a tiny crew. Because the crew was just a couple of guys, he just had a couple of lights they had to move around.

Eli Wallach said that parts of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly were filmed with just him, Sergio Leone and the cameraman.

I don't know where I'm going with this or why. But it's inspiring that someone with a crew of three and a star (Weinstein) who's never acted before can make a commercially viable movie. Weinstein's waiting to see the finished product before he starts calling himself an actor.

Fyre Fraud

The Hulu Fyre Festival documentary was more clear-eyed than the one Netflix did. Billy McFarland was a conman plain and simple. He discovered early on that he could make money defrauding millennials so he kept doing it. Then he also began defrauding investors.

As soon as he was out on bail, McFarland started again, sending emails to everyone on his mailing list offering to sell them tickets he didn't have to shows and events.

They paid McFarland to appear in the documentary. They interviewed him in prison. He talked and talked and at one point challenged them to name one thing he had said that wasn't true. They couldn't respond offhand, but they did a montage showing some of the lies he had just told them.

A psychologist had no doubt he would be at it again as soon as he was only of the slam.

Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened

In the Netflix documentary, Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened, a high ranking gay employee of the festival tells how he was asked by Billy McFarland to perform an oral act of love on a Bahamian Customs official to get their shipment of bottled water released. It turned out not to be necessary, but the guy was actually going to do it.

I don't know why Billy McFarland couldn't have done it himself. Being a presumed heterosexual shouldn't have been that big an impediment.

At the time it was going on, there wasn't much sympathy for the victims--the would-be festival goers. They kept having to explain that they did NOT pay $12,000 for tickets.

The documentary focuses almost entirely on the poor fools who worked for McFarland as they slowly realized he was a big giant fraud.

Leaving Neverland

Well. Yes. Of course Michael Jackson was a pedophile. I don't know how he could have made it any more obvious. A four hour documentary, Leaving Neverland, was shown at the Sundance Film Festival detailing his abuse of two of his victims. Seven cops were posted in the theater after threats from Jackson's fans.

I don't know if I'll watch the movie. I'm depressed just reading about it.

Bernie Sanders, imperialist

The "socialist" Bernie Sanders is backing the right-wing coup the Trump regime is engineering in Venezuela. I remember when the idiot called Hugo Chavez a "dead Communist dictator".

I'm afraid Sanders is old and stupid. Just another imperialist.

We can forget about that guy.

Chris Hansen evicted, his wife divorcing him

People magazine reports that Chris Hansen last paid his rent in August and was $400 short. Now he's been evicted from his New York City home and his wife is divorcing him. Another report from People said he was caught carrying on with another woman.

I'm repeating myself, but my guess is that the success of "To Catch a Predator" limited Hansen's ability to do anything else. Men seeking teenagers on the internet may be an important story to report, but they reported it endlessly. Hansen went from reporter to reality star and now he's washed up, having to turn to Kickstarter to give himself a job.

He needs to downsize. Find a reliable used car, move into a rented room. Maybe he could work in local news or become a high school teacher. I hope he's a college graduate.

If anyone's interested, here's a 2007 article, "The Shame Game" from the Columbia Journalism Review about the show:

https://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_shame_game.php

Chris Hansen's falling apart

Chris Hansen apparently resolved the bad check charge. He paid Promotional Sales Ltd the $13,000 he's owed them for two years. When asked what took him so long, Hansen's lawyer said it was an "oversight".

Hansen bought 355 ceramic mugs, 288 T-shirts and 650 vinyl decals which he was supposed to send to people who donated to his Kickstarter campaign. Contributors were promised a mug for a $20 donation, a signed photo for $40 and a T-shirt and personalized mug with their name for any donation over $45. People have been waiting four years for their stuff and still haven't gotten it.

I've heard that filmmakers who tried using Kickstarter have either said it wasn't worth the trouble or that it was more work that they thought it would be.

Hansen's been having other financial problems. According to a local newspaper:

In 2015, American Express sued Hansen for $57,900, claiming he “refused to make payment on the balance due and owing” on a Platinum card, according to a civil complaint. Hansen didn’t appear in court, and court records show no attorney listed for the media personality in this case.

Last spring, Ally Financial filed a lawsuit, claiming Hansen stopped making payments on his 2014 Corvette, records show. In Ally’s complaint, filed in June 2018, the company said he still owed thousands on the $65,000 sports car when he stopped paying in November 2017.

State Judge Edward R Karazin Jr. in June granted Ally a “replevin order,” allowing the company to repossess the Corvette.

Hansen’s million-dollar Shippan home, which he owned from 1994 until last year, is now owned by US Bank Trust, which seized it last July.

I have no idea where things went wrong for Hansen. "To Catch a Predator" wasn't exactly journalism. I wonder if that wrecked his career. Or maybe it just petered out and he's not making as much money as he used to.

Chris Hansen, "To Catch a Predator" arrested

To Catch a Predator "host" Chris Hansen has been arrested for writing $13,000 in bad checks.

To Catch a Predator always had problems with journalistic ethics. They weren't reporting news, they were creating it, working closely with police, using the power of the media to punish people for alleged crimes. Chris Hansen essentially impersonated a police officer, stepping out and ordering people to empty their pockets.

Well, turns out Hansen has problems with ethics in general. In 2015, he launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new show he would call "Hansen vs Predator". In 2017, he ordered promotional material--mugs and t-shirts he would give to donors--and paid with a bad check for $13,000. In 2018, Hansen gave the company another bad check to cover the first, and it bounced, too.

Finally, when Hansen refused to speak to the police about it, they put out a warrant for his arrest.

Reporters tried to contact him but his phone's been disconnected.

Poor dumb wretch.

Stupid dream

I dreamed I went to the funeral of the Queen of England. She was lying in state somewhere and I wanted to go see, but when I started to ask a copper where the queen was, I realized that since she died, there was a NEW queen and the cop might not instantly understand that I meant the dead queen, not the new one.

Of course, now that I'm awake, I realize I could have easily explained my question or phrased it differently.

I better check the news. If the queen's really dead, I could be psychic.

The Third Man, 1950 review

I was listening to critic A.S. Hamrah interviewed on the radio. He talked about reading Manny Farber's 1950 review of The Third Man in The Nation magazine. The movie is now classic. A few years ago, The Guardian called it "a near perfect work". But it hadn't reached that status just yet and the review had some interesting points.

Read it here:

https://www.thenation.com/article/third-man/

Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, et al

Pauline Kael trying to be pixieish with her shoes on the furniture.

It's kind of interesting to me how these people die and it's like they never existed. Pauline Kael, Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert. They were so influential, but when they're gone, they're gone. Almost like they never existed. Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert published books, but who wants to read a book of movie reviews that only goes to 1991 in Kael's case or 2013 in Roger Ebert's?

Pauline Kael was a horrible person who damaged cinema itself with her attacks on Orson Welles and David Lean and probably others. Her one attempt at an original work, her book on Citizen Kane, was essentially a fraud.

Ebert? Well, he attacked Ishtar. I think Warren Beatty was mad at him and Gene Siskel for that. Beatty felt that it was of no concern to the public how much money was wasted making a movie, and he may have been right to a degree. Why should that affect whether you like it or not? On the other hand, I liked El Mariachi better knowing how little if cost.

Ebert was an early supporter of Jon Jost's zero-budget films, although that was something David Lean complained about--that critics liked nothing better than to support new talent making movies on a shoestring. That left Lean out. They were much more critical of his movies.

In a book I read on cult movies, the author discussed Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, screenplay by Roger Ebert. The author said that he had been watching Russ Meyer movies for years, always thinking that if this poor guy just had some money to work with, he could be a great director. Then came his chance. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was his one major studio film, and it turned out to be pretty much like all the other crap he'd be churning out all those years.

The sad truth is that if you've watched the low budget first films of fledgling directors, you may have already plumbed the full depths of their talent. It's something we all need to cope with. We're probably not as good as we think.

That one little puke's been identified

According to the internet, his name is Nicholas Sandmann.

Now who's that jackass in the center?

Reportedly, the kid's mother blames "black Muslims" for all this. She's not helping.

Now CNN and some others are saying that the story is more complex that previously thought. They're saying that it started when the Covington Catholic High School students got into a verbal exchange with some Black guys who were preaching there for some reason. Nathan Phillips tried to intervene and this somehow led to this, which was what was reported to begin with.

The little puke was blocking Phillips way. The future Brett Kavanaughs from Covington Catholic are clearly mocking the Indians who were there for a ceremony honoring American Indians killed in the Vietnam War.

Look at the kid in the center of the pictures wearing the white hat.

Covington Catholic High School

I'm going to bed. Hoping that when I wake up, the people of Twitter will have the names of all those Covington Catholic High School boys (it's an all-boys school) harassing American Indians in Washington, DC.

The way you deal with racism is to expose and isolate the racists.

They're bourgeois, from an (almost) all-white Catholic prep school in Kentucky. They were in Washington to attend an anti-abortion rally. They started out heckling some Black Christians before going after the Indians. I guess they thought white racism was "pro-life". Anti-abortion groups are circulating a petition calling for Covington Catholic to keep their scumbag students away from their events. It sounds like more than half their students were there.

Also in the news, here's a seven foot, three hundred pound behemoth who was Covington Catholic High School's star basketball player being arraigned for rape and sodomy.

According to the sheriff's department, Walter repeatedly assaulted and choked the 18-year-old victim, ignoring her pleas to stop. The news release also stated the victim was afraid to have sex with Walter because of his size: He stands 7 feet tall and weighs 300 pounds. 

"Walter dismissed the victim by laughing at her and telling her that she would be fine," Sgt. Philip Ridgell wrote in the release. 

In court, prosecutors said the victim's mother stepped in to find a way to get Walter out of the house.

"Later the victim told her mother and made an excuse on why he needed to leave, giving her an opportunity to call the police," the prosecutor said.

A medical examination later revealed bruises and multiple lacerations on the woman's body. 

Walter went on to repeatedly text and call the victim, Ridgell wrote.

I should be nicer

One of those three guys was my teacher.

My mother is a member of a writing group. There've been changes in the hours I work, so I've joined it, too. At 56, I'm the youngest one there. I was little disturbed that one of my old teachers was there. I really just want to forget my teenage years, but, of course, the guy had no memory of me. I ran into him once, 30 years ago. I was with some friends and we had all had him as a teacher. We were three thousand miles away on the east coast. He looked at my friends and shook his head and said, "I don't remember you." Then he pointed at me and said, "YOU, I remember!"

I didn't know what the hell to write. I found an old blog entry about a high school teacher who had appeared in a terrible movie in the 1970's. I finally got to see it when they showed it on Rifftrax. Really, really awful. Apparently filmed for the most part without a script. It was half western, half wildlife documentary.

It was about a man who rides around on a buffalo. That's pretty much the whole storyline. The producers went to a tourist attraction somewhere, saw a man riding a buffalo and thought it would be a great idea for a movie.

It's possible that they didn't film the wildlife footage themselves. It may have been outtakes from a different movie they didn't use it because all it showed was horrible, horrible things happening to animals. There was a lot of fighting, animals tried to drown each other, baby raccoons were swept away down a river, another racoon was trapped on a piece of ice floating down a river.

One of the Rifftrax guy said, "ALL the animals were harmed in the making of this picture."

That poor teacher. He told the class he was in a movie over the summer. He was trying to share exciting news about a major event in his life and we just sat there. We didn't care. Which was lucky for him. If any of us had somehow found our way to that movie, he would have never lived it down.

He was a drama teacher by training but found himself teaching about the history of western civilization. He knew more than we did, but he didn't seem very well qualified.

I was nervous about reading in front of people anyway, then I realized a teacher was in the group. Did he know the teacher I was reading about? Would he know who I was talking about? Would he think I was overly critical about the creative efforts of all my other teachers, him included? He had written a couple of young adult novels. He even got a movie deal for one of them. Did he think I was snottily hate-watching his movie and hate-reading his books?

If only I could go back and correct my past! I would have shown a polite interest in that guy's movie. He was only in two movies and they were both about the guy riding a buffalo. I would have told him about the actors who had their careers ruined trying to live up to the Oscars they won. Shirley Booth and Ernest Borgnine both ended up doing TV series. Being in a terrible movie gave him freedom to operate. Becoming a staple of movies of this type was probably a viable career option.

Acting is an art form like any other---you sometimes have to make your own gigs. He was a teacher. He had a good income and his summers were free. He should have bought a Bell & Howell 70 and kept a few thousand feet of film in his freezer. He could have become a big fish in local cinema, like the drama teacher who preceded him who left teaching and started producing a big local musical every few years. He couldn't possibly do any worse than that buffalo movie.

On the other hand, I was in that guy's class for a full semester and he never said a word to me. I don't think he knew my name. Why should I have pretended to be interested in his ghastly buffalo movie?

Carl Bernstein, dumb as the rest of them

It turns out that Carl Bernstein is as dumb as Bob Woodward. Bernstein now claims that Donald Trump is a Russian spy doing Putin's dirty work, "destabilizing" the United States.

We've already seen the sad spectacle of Democrats claiming that Black Lives Matter is a Russian plot. They bring up the fact that Communists supported the Civil Rights Movment.

Is there anyone in Russia doing anything to destabilize Russia? Are they all American agents or de facto American agents trying to undermine their own country for the benefit of a foreign power?

Using Bernstein's logic, is ANYONE in the US government not an Israeli agent?

#MeToo

I don't feel like a genius because of it, but I don't think I ever especially liked the work of any of the people exposed by the #MeToo movement. And even if I did like their work, I don't expect much of celebrities. It doesn't surprise me when they turn out to be horrible people.

When I was a kid, they'd show the movie Compulsion on TV a couple of times a year, the movie based on the Leopold & Loeb case in the 1920's. Nathan Leopold seemed pitiful. But he was still a child killer and a would-be rapist. It taught me that even pathetic people had sinister urges, something not obvious to children.

Then there was the wave of scandals involving TV evangelists. I don't remember how old I was when that was going on. I was actually surprised that those guys were so depraved. Jimmy Swaggart was very cheap. He drove around in a Lincoln Town Car offering prostitutes too little money, then he didn't even tip them.

I was already disillusioned when the #MeToo thing started. It still surprises me that people with so much to lose do things like this. In Oregon, we had Neil Goldschmidt---he had been governor of the state, Secretary of Transportation under Jimmy Carter (twelfth in line for the presidency). For years he remained a powerbroker in the state Democratic Party. It turned out that when he was mayor of Portland, he was molesting a fourteen-year-old girl. People working with him including police officers knew about it and did nothing.

In a different matter, I liked the work of Werner Herzog, most of it, but I don't want to watch his movies anymore after finding out about his horrible, sadistic acts of animal abuse. He's a monster.

I liked Klaus Kinski, but look at him. I'd never want to be around that guy. It turned out he raped his daughter for years. Even if he hadn't, it had to have been a nightmare for any child forced to live with him.

I admire the work of Charles Bukowski, but I'd never go near him, either.

Trip to Bountiful (1985)

I watched it again after I don't know how many years. Geraldine Page won on Oscar for her role as an old women living with her son and daughter-in-law in Houston in the late 1940's who runs away from home to return to Bountiful, the farming town she was from that was now a ghost town.

It was sad, but I also found Page's character kind of annoying partly because it was based on a play and everyone talked constantly.

I find it depressing to think about. My mother and her extended family lived in a small town. They all lived on the same short stretch of road outside of town. They were there from 1911 to just a couple of years ago when the last two died. There are none left there now, all either deceased or moved away.

I've had some passing thoughts of moving there when I retire. It should be a cheap place to live, but for a town that small it has a shockingly high murder rate. One crime made it onto Unsolved Mysteries. A local restaurant has a wall decorated with Tea Party material, much of it explicitly racist, a local pastor and his wife are in prison for refusing to pay taxes because they thought owning real estate meant they were an independent country. I watched YouTube videos of cops there harassing the homeless, but they do that everywhere.

David Edelstein canned

He doesn't look at all the way I pictured him.

I didn't know David Edelstein was fired from NPR's Fresh Air. It's been over a month. I haven't listened to the show in years. It turns out Edlestein posted and quickly deleted a quip on Facebook on the occasion of Bernardo Bertolucci's death, "Even grief is better with butter." But Carradine spawn and TV star Martha Plimpton splashed it all over Twitter.

She tweeted: “All day I’ve avoided noting this man’s death precisely because of this moment in which a sexual assault of an actress was intentionally captured on film. And this asshole makes it into this joke. Fire him. Immediately.”

Why was it her business to note anyone's death?

Maria Schneider had said in an interview years after the fact that she "felt a little raped" after a sodomy scene in Last Tango in Paris. She made it clear that she was not actually raped. Edelstein never read the interview and Plimpton didn't either, apparently.

There were TWO scenes in the movie in which butter was used as a lubricant. Maybe Edelstein meant the other one.

According to a statement from NPR, "Today we learned about film critic David Edelstein's Facebook post in response to the death of film director Bernardo Bertolucci. The post is offensive and unacceptable, especially given actress Maria Schneider's experience during the filming of 'Last Tango in Paris.' The post does not meet the standards we expect from Fresh Air contributors, or from journalists associated with WHYY or NPR. We appreciate the apology David posted, but we have decided to end Fresh Air's association with him, and have informed David accordingly."

Edelstein's "joke" was kind of disgusting. It was a reference, but did it qualify as a joke? What was funny about it? Maybe if Bertolucci's death had somehow been butter-related.

Burt Reynolds, Shamus

It was three in the morning and I was lying there wide awake, so I turned on the TV and started watching Shamus with Burt Reynolds as a private detective.

The opening scene was shockingly violent. Criminals fire a flame thrower through a skylight and burn two people to death, then, wearing one of those suits firefighters wear, one of them goes into the burning room and steals a safe.

This was based on a book by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) who also wrote the book the movie Fuzz was based on, and if I remember correctly they set fire to people in that movie, too.

Burt Reynolds is hired to find some stolen diamonds. His investigation consists primarily of fight scenes. He attacks a couple of guys, beats information out of them. They actually give in pretty easily.

This surprised me because it was based on one of McBain's 87th Precinct novels which I thought were police procedurals trying to cash in on the popularity of Dragnet in the 1950's. Another book in that series was King's Ransom which Kurosawa's High & Low was based on.

I watched the first 38 minutes. It's possible it got really good after that but I'll never know. I turned it off after Burt Reynolds goes with his cop friend to see a mafia boss who insists that they eat Italian food with him as he gives them information about the case.

They made it clear that Burt Reynolds did most of his own stunts. He was supposed to be down and out but he drove what was then a late model Chevy Impala. They stole the bookstore scene from The Big Sleep. Burt Reynolds commits a minor sexual assault--pinches a woman in a crowded restaurant. She finds it charming. He tells a man wearing sunglasses that he looks like a "faggot movie star". He wears a stupid-looking '70's trenchcoat.

Free with Amazon Prime.

And this is the last Timothee Chalamet thing

There are a number of actors I've never found believable. Macaulay Culkin, Natalie Portman, Marilyn Monroe, Leonardo DiCaprio and Warren Beatty. I'm sure there are others. I can't put my finger on what they were doing wrong, but I've never found them believable in any role.

What they all had in common was that they were taken seriously only because they were really good-looking.

Timothee Chamalet is a lovely boy, but for the moment I'd put him in that catagory. That's based on the single movie I've seen him in. Of course, he did get nominated for an Oscar, so what do I know.

I turned against him because he attacked Woody Allen after being in his movie. But he's become a scrawny, androgynous teen idol for high brow adults.  He's the thinking man's Finn Wolfhard. I guess that's a good thing.

The curse of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger

None of these guys lived past 50.

When I was six or seven, I asked my parents why women lived longer than men. My father said it was because men worked harder and my mother said it was because women worked harder. But I guess it was true. Women really did live longer if the cast of Rocky Jones is anything to go by.

I watched a Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of a Rocky Jones Space Ranger movie. I looked up one of the actors and was startled that the poor guy died at a very young age. I looked up some others and a lot of them died very young. The show was on in 1954. I guess life expectancy was awful back then, at least for men.

I looked up the rest of the cast who appeared in four episodes or more. Here it is. The ones who didn't make it to retirement are in bold:

Richard Crane who played Rocky Jones died at age 50.

Scotty Beckett who played Winky died at 38.

Robert Lydon who played Bobby died at 43.

Sally Mansfield did so much better. She died at 77.

Maurice Cass who played the elderly professor died at 69.
 
Charles Meredith who played the Secretary of Space died at 70.

William Hudson died at 55.
 
Harry Lauter did better, made it to 76.

Cliff Ferre, 75.

Leonard Penn, 67.

Robert Lydon's brother, Jimmy, was born in 1923 and is still kicking.

Ted Hecht, 61.

Mickey Simpson, 71.

John Banner survived a Nazi concentration camp and died at age 63.

Reginald Sheffield, 56.

Dayton Lummis lived to be 84.

Lane Bradford, 60.

Ann Robinson was born in 1929 and is still with us.

Walter Coy died at 65.

Guy Prescott lived to be 84.

Richard Avonde, 66.

Rand Brooks, 84.

Thomas Browne Henry, 72.

James Griffith, 77.

Charles Horvath, 57.

Sol Gorss, 58.

Beautiful Boy - addiction is awful but not interesting

 

It's the first thing I've seen Timothee Chalamet in. There was foreshadowing five minutes in. Steve Carell finds a paperback copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned on his son's desk. They were really playing up Chalamet's looks.

I sat through Beautiful Boy, now available on Amazon Prime. It was dreary and repetitive as any movie about drug addiction is bound to be. It was hard to mourn the lost potential of a promising young man when you can see right in front of you that he got a book and movie deal out of it. His family was surprisingly wealthy to begin with. What did he need potential for?

Timothee Chalamet smiles as he reads an especially bad Charles Bukowski poem in a university class. "This man has saved my life multiple times," he says.

Oddly, he reads the poem from a copy of Factotum which was a novel. I don't remember there being a poem in there. But the novel was about working and we never see these guys work. How did Nic (Chalamet) get money when he was out on the street in the throes of drug addiction? We don't see the nuts and bolts of homelessness and addiction.

We do see that Chalamet is one of those guys who folds books back when he reads them.

I've known people who have survived drug addiction and some who didn't survive. Some were working class, some middle class. I work with a woman who watched her son die of an overdose while waiting for paramedics. I don't know why people start taking drugs in the first place.

There was a woman I knew, a recovering anorexic who put on a lot of weight at one point. She begged an acquaintance to score her some meth to lose weight. He had been in prison for selling cocaine and even he was aghast. Even if he knew where to find it he wouldn't have gotten it for her. She thought he was worried that she would turn him in and kept assuring him he could trust her. So I know that some people start using drugs out of sheer idiocy.

Harriet Craig (1950) Joan Crawford, Wendell Corey

Harriett Craig is lying and manipulative with an upper-class husband. They have a couple of servants and a big old house. She falsely tells him she can't have children and tells his boss he has a gambling problem to keep him from getting a promotion that will require he go away on business trips.

It wasn't bad. Wendell Corey plays a nice guy who's befriended the widow and her son who live next door.

I'm not sure how I should feel about a housewife as villain in a movie made in 1950 when women faced terrible oppression. It wasn't as explicitly sexist as some other Joan Crawford movies.

My mother keeps wanting to watch movies but it's hard to find anything. It has to be something inoffensive but she doesn't like old movies and they have to grab her immediately or she wants to turn them off. I was surprised she sat through this thing. She seemed to like it in spite of some problems. It was dialog-laden and the dialog wasn't terribly realistic. There was nothing subtle.