We're doomed. Dooooomed.

Pretty much nobody who failed to vote for Hillary Clinton feels bad about it. A few voted for Jill Stein but larger numbers just didn't vote.

It raises doubts about the explanation that people didn't vote for her because they thought it was a forgone conclusion that she would win. In any case, the corporate Democrats think it's a forgone conclusion that Trump will lose this time because everyone will now vote for absolutely anybody the Democrats nominate, even if it's Biden.

This is why Trump will be re-elected.

The Democrats have used this strategy for years. They think as long as they're ever so slightly to the left of the Republican, all the leftists and progressive and liberals will have no choice but to vote for them.

Jimmy Carter was a terrible conservative. People don't seem to remember this. He ended detente with the Soviet Union, he brought back draft registration and he raised the military budget several hundred percent while slashing social spending. His projected military budget was higher that Reagan's actual budget turned out to be. His crap about "human rights" was simply an excuse to attack the Soviet Union while he was an avid supporter of death squads in Latin America. He refused to pay reparations to Vietnam because, he said, "The destruction was mutual". Meaning we dropped seven million tons of bombs on them, but they shot down a few of our planes.

Even Carter knew why he lost. Because liberals couldn't stand him. Enough of them voted for John Anderson who ran as an independent that Carter lost. Carter said this publicly. Anderson had been a Republican and even he was well to the left of him.

The Democratic Party still has "super delegates", but now they only get to vote if no one gets a majority of the delegates in the first ballot. And there are so many candidates that this will never happen. Biden will get the nomination and Trump will be re-elected.

Remake (2012)

 

I went the other direction. Clicked on an obscure Roku channel featuring a lot of public domain and very cheap recent movies. I clicked on a movie called Remake. A pastor learns that his wife used to be a porn star and that their 36-year-old teenage daughter has been kidnapped by a maker of snuff films. Made in Minneapolis in 2012. I looked it up on imdb.com and found there's a thriving regional movie industry there. At least the people involved in this movie did several others.

It's a weirdly right-wing movie. At one point, the pastor explains that the Bible says that people who don't work shouldn't eat. There's a long discussions of pornography and they bring up the Meese Commission report (The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography Final Report) issued under the Reagan administration. I was surprised anyone remembered it in 2012.

Perhaps now that the internet has taken over and pornography is everywhere--now that every teenage boy is a veritable King Farouk--we can admit that dirty movies might be bad.


So. I watched most of this movie, Remake. I didn't watch it to the end, but I think the mother was going to sacrifice herself in a Christ-like manner to save her daughter.

The writer-director-star Doug Phillips had been a critic for conservative publications.
 
According to his bio on imdb:

Doug's films and screenplays tend to deal with adult themes, but in a message-oriented, non-exploitative way. Frequent "message" themes include racism, greed, and dysfunctional family relationships. Occasionally his films include explicit Evangelical content. More often, an underlying theme of faith is implicitly present but is not openly vocalized.

I didn't know this when I watched it. I thought it was either the most shocking Christian movie or the least shocking exploitation film I'd ever seen.

Phillips is Minneapolis's answer to Paul Schrader. Schrader was a movie critic and film scholar. He was from a hyper-religious family and didn't see his first film until he was seventeen. He wrote Taxi Driver and went on to direct Hard Core starring George C. Scott as a Calvinist father who has to rescue his teen daughter from pornographers. The tagline was, "Oh my God! That's my daughter!" Like Remake, it presented snuff films as a real thing.
 

Hong Sang-soo's "Claire's Camera" (2017)

I had never heard of Korean director Hong Sang-soo. His work is being featured the Criterion Channel. He's made 25 features and he's been making two or three movies a year.

I don't know if Claire's Camera is typical of his work. It was filmed in Cannes I guess during the film festival there. He's known for working on low budgets, he films everything on location but doesn't spend a lot of time scouting locations. According to the fellow in the video introducing his work, he writes the script for the day's shooting starting at 4 AM so by 9 AM he's ready to go to work.

The movie stars Isabelle Huppert as a kind of annoying person. She's a music teacher by trade, but she tells people she's an artist because she takes snap shots with one of those instant, Polaroid-type cameras they make now. I don't know if we're supposed to take her seriously as an artist, but I've run into people like that and they're embarrassing to listen to. She befriends a Korean director and a couple of the women who work for company marketing his movies.



It made me think of a "documentary" I had seen about The Brady Bunch. Sherwood Schwartz talked about a scene in Hawaii where Peter is in his pajamas and finds there's a big, hairy tarantula on him. Schwartz said that Christopher Knight really didn't want that thing walking around on him, but he did a good job. The interviewer asked how he felt about forcing a child actor to do a scene like that when he didn't want to. Schwartz shrugged. He said there was more to being an actor than saying your lines.

In this movie, all the actors did was say their lines. There were long dialog scenes, the actors sit at tables in cafes or restaurants of stand in one spot on the beach. The camera is on a tripod in every scene. He pans a little and uses the zoom lens, but the scenes are all filmed in one long take.

I can see how the guy could make three movies a year.

Reportedly made for $100,000. Woody Allen could make a movie like this so easily.

Yojimbo with commentary

Long ago, I had a VHS tape of Yojimbo. For a long time, I watched it every day. I'd watch it while eating lunch or before work. If I was home alone, I would turn it on. I had Plan 9 From Outer Space on the same tape and half the time I would watch it, too.

So anyway, on the Criterion Channel, I watched it with commentary by Steven Prince. Learned many things I didn't know. He discussed samurai stuff, social changes in Japan both in the 1860's and the 1960's, references to Kurosawa's career, the effect the movie had on Toshiro Mifune's career----this was the movie that made him The John Wayne of Japan.

Susumu Fujita played the fencing instructor who was mad that he was overshadowed by Toshiro Mifune's character. In real life, Fujita has starred in Kurosawa's early films before the director pushed him aside for Mifune. Fujita was a good sport for taking the role.

There were all the scenes of people crying for their mothers, the part that was borrowed from The Glass Key, the political role the Yakuza played in postwar Japan.

Over the years, I've found the severed body parts harder to take and there's more blood in some scenes than others. I must have always known that in a situation like that, I would be one of the victims being hacked to death with a sword, not a samurai-with-no-name gracefully killing the bad guys. Why would anyone want to be a samurai? It seems like a lot of work.

Rainy Day in New York looking for an American distributor

Variety has reported that Amazon gave back the domestic distribution rights to Woody Allen's Rainy Day in New York. He's working on finding a distributor.

The author of the article had some doubt they would find an American distributor, but it's hard to tell. Writers keep talking about them like they were normal movies, like he doesn't have his niche audience. Nothing has changed for him in twenty-five years. He has the same audience he's always had. I guess he did draw in new people to see Midnight in Paris. It's possible he was trying to get kids to come to Rainy Day in New York by putting Selena Gomez in it, but Timothee Chalamet? Did teens flock to Call Me By Your Name or Beautiful Boy?

I never imagined anyone going to Woody Allen movies to see Leonardo DiCaprio or Steve Carrell or---who are the other big shots who've been in his movies? I assumed he liked casting big names so he wouldn't have to direct the actors.

I could be wrong. I read John Baxter's biography of Woody Allen and he had different view. He wrote about Shadows and Fog as a failed horror movie because there was nothing really scary in it. I had always taken it as a borderline art house movie. Maybe I should judge his work in more conventional terms. It's probably how he sees it.
  

Bugsy Malone (1976)

I remember when this thing was on Home Box Office in the '70's. Even back then, something bothered me about Scott Baio. I didn't really understand how being hit in the face with a pie was the child equivalent of being murdered with a machine gun. Were the kids supposed to be dying?

Bugsy Malone was a musical gangster movie performed entirely by tweenagers. I didn't like musicals anyway and the children's singing was dubbed by adults. I was thirteen at the time and didn't think about the fact that twelve-year-olds were playing showgirls, something some critics found disturbing.

John Cassisi who played gangster Fat Sam was convicted of money laundering and bribery in 2015 and sentenced to two to six years.

I remember Cassisi on the sit-com Fish, a Barney Miller spin-off starring Abe Vigoda. Fish retires from the police force and he and his wife run a group home for foster kids. The only thing I remember was Cassisi saying that he was bound to get adopted now that his face cleared up. It got a laugh from the studio audience, but I found it so sad.

Watching Bugsy Malone now, decades later, I feel kind of depressed what with children playing impoverished adults, frustrated singers and dancers and murder victims. The child actors were pretty good.

According to imdb.com, Scott Baio and Florence Dugger couldn't stand each other, had no chemistry and the scene where they had to hug had to be shot over and over because she didn't want to touch him. It was made in Britain and Jodie Foster was terrified of the English children. It was like Lord of the Flies. Corporal punishment wouldn't be banned in Britain for another ten years and now the British are beginning to prosecute teachers for sadistic abuse they committed in the 1970's. The English kids had to have been a bit warped.

It's now available on the Criterion Channel, introduced with an interview with Sophia Coppola. 

One good thing about DVD's

I saw it claimed somewhere that VHS tapes of South Korean soap operas are popular in North Korea. It was reported that police would shut off power to a building so people couldn't eject and hide their tapes, then they would raid their apartments to see what they were watching. It may be true but I don't know how anyone would know, and I'm not sure it even makes sense.

But are we any better off here in the West with the NSA able to monitor our streaming video viewing habits?

I've said on here before that I keep turning on the 1950's film The Naked Witch because it puts me to sleep. It turns out to be a common thing. People turn on a movie they've seen countless times to help them fall asleep.

The Naked Witch would probably get a PG rating today. PG-13 would be overkill. But it still bothers me that, if anyone were to check my viewing history, they would find that I had played the same 1950's nudie film hundreds of times.

This is why DVDs should always have a place.

This occurred to me when I looked at this article on CD's. I don't have a subscription, so all I read was the headline:

Why Play a Music CD? ‘No Ads, No Privacy Terrors, No Algorithms’

Streaming services have revolutionized the discovery of songs, but here’s why Ben Sisario, who covers the music industry, still likes to listen to compact discs.

I used to watch a DVD of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World which usually put me to sleep in the first ten minutes and The Ape Man with Bela Lugosi which I've played countless times. I still have no idea what it's about.

Chris Olsen: The Boy Who Cried

There's a short documentary by experimental filmmaker Mark Rappaport called Chris Olsen: The Boy Who Cried about a generic child actor who could apparently cry on cue. He worked with some of the greatest directors and biggest stars in Hollywood. He played Doris Day's son in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. He was interviewed when Doris Day died a few days ago. He said they did more re-takes doing the song Que Sera Sera than he had done on any other movie.

I was surprised to learn that he was the brother of Susan Olsen, TV's Cindy Brady.

The documentary is available on Fandor along with several others Rappaport made. I let my subscription to Fandor lapse, otherwise I might have a little more to say about it.

I just did a quick google search for "how to cry on cue". They gave pointers like, stay hydrated and don't try to force it.

Heartless wealthy parasites turn on working class girl

Callous rich bastards she thought were her friends turned on her and sent her to prison because she was working class.

Come on now! Do I have to go around telling people exactly how much money I have in the bank? Because they put a poor girl in prison for telling people she had $60 million. And do you have some kind of obligation to correctly tell everybody who you're related to? I routinely refer to my first cousins-once-removed or my second cousins simply as my cousins. Is this a crime now? That poor girl told people she was an heiress. Did she really have a legal obligation to correctly tell everyone her father's income?

Innocent Anna Sorokin, the German daughter of a hard working truck driver, has been sentenced to prison for harmlessly telling her wealthy friends that stuff.

Essentially, the judge ruled that if a rich person gives you money or covers your bills, that you have a legal obligation to assume they're doing it only because they think you're extremely rich and not because they're your friends. You are now required by law to think that rich people are all incredibly shallow with a depraved indifference to anyone who's not as rich as they are.

Tim Conway RIP

Tim Conway has died after a long illness.

When I was five or six and we played McHale's Navy, we all wanted to be him.

Doris Day RIP

I don't remember the name of the movie, but Doris Day was the first movie stewardess to take over flying the plane after the pilot and co-pilot were incapacitated. That was in the '50's. Back then, you could freely carry loaded guns onto airliners. Her jealous ex-husband got into a gunfight with the pilot.

She landed the plane, something Karen Black didn't manage in Airport 1975.
 
Doris Day died yesterday at age 97.

Felicity Huffman pleads guilty

Felicity Huffman tearfully pleaded guilty to the charge of being a caring mother and helping her daughter get into a good college. Her daughter, she said, has been seeing neuropsychiatrist since she was eight or eleven depending on which article you read and really did need extra time to complete the SATs, not like the other rich kids who were faking it.

Prosecutors want her to get four months in jail.

I'm not sure I'd want it announced to the world that I'd been seeing a neuropsychiatrist since I was in grade school. No point in revealing private medical information of any kind.

You know what seems awfully coincidental to me? The fact that both the actresses in this thing have fairly common last names but with slightly unusual spellings. Aren't they usually spelled Hoffman and Laughlin? You think this played any role in their turn to criminality?

Night of the Shooting Stars (Italy, 1982)

I had seen this at the university years ago, and I may have seen it on video at some point. The things I liked about it were the horrible fascist father-son team in their black shirts, murdering people and acting like fascist scum, but just so happy to be together. I like how they ended up, too.

And there was a the battle in a field between fascists and partisans, all armed mostly with Mannlicher Carcanos. Gun fights with guns that aren't really ideal to the circumstances appeal to me for whatever reason. Maybe because you get to see a gunfight without thinking about how it's going to inspire gun nuts to run out and buy one.

But overall, the movie was a bit of a disappointment to me. Maybe it was just the look of it, filmed in the 1980's.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Peggy Lipton, RIP

As far as I know, I haven't seen her in anything but The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks and I hadn't watched Twin Peaks until a Russian novelist I talked to online told me he was a fan. I watched it on Netflix. I was surprised to see her name in the credits. I thought about regaling the my Russian friend with the full story of The Mod Squad. Maybe he would have been fascinated by this glimpse into the American psyche, but I thought better of it.

My least favorite Mod Squad episode was the one where Julie (Peggy Lipton) is shot in the head when an autistic kid (Lee H. Montgomery) finds a gun. Now I read that the bullet just grazed her. I wondered for years how Julie survived that. Maybe I'd like it if I watched it again.

But I was turned off to Charlie's Angels when they used the same plot in an early episode.

Peggy Lipton has died at 72.

Woody Allen's Rainy Day In New York

Dylan Farrow is probably sobbing in a fetal position at this very moment.

Rainy Day in New York is picking up distribution deals throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Filmwelt/NFP is set to release the movie in Germany this fall.

According to Variety, Christoph Ott, Filmwelt/NFP’s head of distribution, expressed delight at being “part of the family of international distributors that will release the film in Europe, China, Japan, Korea, Russia and Latin and South America.”

Maybe it won't be released in the U.S. If not, I hope it will be an inspiration to European filmmakers to forget the United States, stop filming in English and make movies for their own people.

Private detectives, etc

You forget how absurdly violent TV was in the '60's and '70's.

I have an episode of Mannix on. The old private eye show. With fist fights and gun fights in every episode. I don't know how many people Mannix killed over the course of the series.

This was why The Rockford Files was considered realistic in its day. Jim Rockford would call the police if anyone assaulted him. But even working on that show, James Garner was a physical wreck. He had surgery on his knees every year when the show was on hiatus, this from working 16 hours a day walking around on cement wearing bad shoes. He should have worn nurses shoes. They could have filmed him from the knees up. TV was a close-up medium.

There was more curiosity about private detectives back then because of the TV shows. Real detectives had to explain in interviews that they didn't get into fights all the time, one said he only carried a gun because his clients expected him to, and that most of their cases involved repossessing cars.

There was a documentary several years ago about a poor guy who was in viral video---a viral video made before viral videos were a thing. It was a middle-aged man, a former TV news anchorman, who began making industrial videos. He was in Georgia or somewhere making a video for Winnebago showing the features for their vehicles that year. It was summer and extremely hot, especially inside the RV's which were sitting out in the sun. The guy had written the script himself. He should have kept it simple and to the point, but he had trouble remembering the complex dialog he had written for himself and they were doing retake after retake. And he became angrier and more frustrated as it continued.

Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDQQfBrSUs0

Long before the Internet, long before YouTube, people were copying and sharing tapes of this poor devil. There was at least one comedy with a character modeled on him.

The poor guy had disappeared. No one knew what became of him. Filmmakers did a documentary about him called Winnebago Man in 2010. They had to hire a private detective to find him. It turns out that private detectives today just pay to join all those websites that let you search for people online. That's pretty much all the "detective" did.

They found him, retired and living in the country. He was cheerful. He knew about the videos and was amused by the whole thing.

When filmmakers went to see him again, he admitted it was all an act. The bastards who made copies of the tapes had stabbed him in back and ruined his life.

If you ever make an industrial film, or any other kind of film, keep the dialog mercifully simple. And try to be dignified when you know you're being recorded.

I'm generally on the side of the guys in front of the camera in cases like these.

I hate Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, but there was video of him getting quite angry because---you know how they have earpieces on TV so that people in the control room can communicate with them while they're on the air? Someone left their mic on so, while he was on live TV, he was listening to a woman in the control room regale her co-workers with what she did that weekend.

O'Donnell was attacked and mocked for it and he apologized. But I don't know what for.

I hear that there's reason to believe that Christian Bale isn't a very nice person, but he probably had a point when he yelled at some poor devil on the crew of a movie who began screwing around with a light while Bale was performing a difficult scene.

And here's hint: if you're a celebrity and you fly into a fit of rage on a movie set, don't say you'll quit the movie as you berate a member of the crew. Because the studio will have to send the tape to their insurance company in case you actually do walk off the film, and then they can lose control of where the tape goes from there and it may wind up plastered all over the internet making you a laughingstock.

And, if you're on the crew of a movie, stand still while the cameras are rolling. That way you won't distract the talent and, if it turns out the camera can see your reflection or they can see you standing there on the edge of the frame, you'll be less noticeable.

Maybe abject poverty wouldn't be so bad

So here are a few examples:

I'm acquainted with a musician, extremely talented jazz guy, who is a recovering heroin addict. He said during that earlier phase of life, he woke up on a beach in Hawaii. He saw a little old man hurrying past him.

"You're Red Skelton!" the musician exclaimed.

"Yes I am," Red Skelton replied without slowing down.

Jon Jost brags that he's "independently poor", but you look at his blog and he's freely traveling the world.

There was an old guy in wheelchair downtown who would ask for spare change all time. He was old and obviously unemployable, so people gave him money. He disappeared for a while. Someone asked where he had been and he had taken a long vacation to the east coast.

I knew a chronically unemployed guy who would take off and go driving across the country.

And here I am, technically impoverished. I could cover a $400 emergency, so I'm better off than 61% of Americans. But why do these penniless slobs get to travel all over while I haven't had a vacation in at least ten years?

It's not an attack on them. I just want in on it.

TMZ: Loughlin has pretty good chance at "not guilty" verdict

TMZ reported on this poster that appeared at USC looking for recruits for the women's rowing team.

"NO EXPERIENCE? NO PROBLEM," the poster reads.

According to TMZ:

...turns out, the poster is real because we've been educated on how USC women's rowing teams work when it comes to recruiting walk-ons and the like. 

A USC alum who was actually a coxswain at the university tells us women's rowing teams often recruit potential teammates who have zero experience in the sport -- which is kinda what Olivia Jade and Isabella were coming to the table with. 

Typically, the way it works is that you already have to be a student to qualify for the team ... it's not for some random people on the street who want in at USC. 

But, here's the thing ... in Lori's case, prosecutors have to prove criminal intent to seal a conviction. Sources connected with Lori's defense claim Lori didn't know the $500k payoff was shady, even if the plan was to pretend her daughters were crew-team ready. The poster would seem to help Lori and her husband, both of whom are charged with multiple felonies, because crew experience doesn't seem to be essential. 

Prosecutors are trying to squeeze Lori and her husband to cop a plea, but our sources say their lawyers believe they have a real shot at getting a not guilty verdict if push comes to shove.

Well, I'm...I guess I'm rooting for them.

I'm anti-Olivia Jade, of course, I'm generally hostile to the rich and admissions to these universities has always been a cruel fraud.

But I'm also anti-prosecutor and I tend to identify with people facing prison, although I also tend to lose all interest in them once they're actually behind bars.

We had a case here in town. Two 18-year-old morons decided to exchange gunfire in a crowded apartment during a party. It was a bit of a miracle that only one by-stander was killed. But then the killers were on the run. Police were looking for them. In the news, they ran their school pictures. They were high school kids. They looked cute. People were posting comments on the news websites worried about their well-being, poor frightened, confused heavily armed kids who started shooting in a crowded apartment.

Every now and then there would be a comment from someone about the 16-year-old boy who was murdered. And it did seem heartless and perverse that people were more worried about the killers than the victim. But I knew from other events like this that, as soon as they were caught, people would forget all about them. They're a lot less sympathetic once you know where they are.

They turned themselves in the next day and people forgot all about them. I don't even remember the outcome of the case.

Like Bill Cosby. I wondered how a rich geezer like him would cope with prison. Should he go to prison? What would be a just sentence for an elderly physical wreck whose crimes were committed years earlier?

Now that he's in prison, I haven't thought twice about it.

Now I wonder how he's doing.

Me listening to the computer

He's not even that good-looking.

I went to the writing group. One of the people had written a play and handed out copies. We did what they call a table read. And the author said I did the best job! I decided to make an effort but to underplay it. And I didn't read the stage direction like everyone else did. Another personal triumph!

Some people go to a restaurant that turns out to be a front for another operation.

Later, I read what I wrote and was humiliated when I realized it was "cute". I had written something horribly cute. I sat there the rest of the time swearing to myself that I would never write anything cute again. 

I'm sitting here listening to Andy Kindler and Josh Weinstein on their Thought Spiral podcast briefly discuss the movie Beautiful Boy. I wrote something about it, but I think I just attacked Timoth---how do you spell his name? Timothee Chalomet? I attacked him because he denounced Woody Allen and vowed to donate to charity the minimal sum Woody Allen paid him. According to the internet, Chalamet has a net worth of $6 million, but he thinks he's a big shot because he donates a few thousand dollars.

Now Andy Kindler is railing against Chris Matthews on MSNBC. He thinks Matthews got Trump elected because he's too even-handed.

Woody Allen's Rainy Day in New York to be released in Italy

Variety is reporting that Woody Allen's Rainy Day in New York is to be released in Italy. We'll see how it goes. It's to be distributed by Lucky Red which distributed Anything Else (2003). A source told Variety that other distributors have made deals to release the movie in other European territories.

Community access TV, Richard Lee, Kurt Cobain

Community access TV from Seattle is available on Roku. I couldn't get it to work for a long time but I clicked on it again and it worked fine. I watched Richard Lee, a "journalist" whose exclusive focus seems to be the death of Kurt Cobain. It was ruled a suicide, but he believes it was murder. He goes into some related issues such as police violence and corruption.

I enjoy his show. It's generally just him holding a camera filming himself. People try to get rid of him but he stands up to the cops and picks fights with everyone. It impresses me that he's able to talk and talk and talk for a full hour.

According to Wikipedia, he was the first to claim Cobain was murdered. Not much of a claim to fame. Kind of morbid, really.

According to The Guardian:

In April 2016, Love gave a statement accusing Lee of trying to exploit Cobain’s death, which he claims to have been investigating for more than 23 years. Love claimed that Lee “stalked and harassed me, my family and my friends for many, many years … On one particular occasion, Mr Lee even filmed himself chasing a limousine for several miles that he thought I was a passenger in. Mr Lee’s actions make me fear for my safety.”

It's now been twenty-five years since Cobain's death. Richard Lee was born in 1963 so he's devoted most of his adult life to this. Which is strange since he doesn't seem to have ever been an actual fan of Kurt Cobain.

He hasn't really offered any explanation for the alleged murder. He seems to blame Courtney Love and Cobain's bandmates, but he hasn't suggested any motive. And why on earth would the police cover it up?

I don't know if it's art, but it's one of the more enjoyable community access shows I've seen.

From an article called "Insane Determination" on The Stranger:

If you haven't watched a Richard Lee show, tune in at least once. At the very least, you'll see what he looks like. That way, if you see him bearing down on you on the sidewalk, you'll know to run away. And don't worry about how you look on camera; Lee will always find a way to make himself look worse.

Campaign photo from when he ran for mayor.

Unrelated (UK, 2007)

A middle aged woman joins her middle aged friends and their families on vacation in Italy. For various reasons finds herself hanging around with their young adult children. She doesn't tell on them when they get into mischief which creates problems when the grown-ups find out.

I once found myself in a similar situation. I was delivering some furniture, had to sit and wait for the lady of the house to come downstairs, so I watched TV with the children. I wasn't sure if I should take it upon myself to stop the baby from ripping up a magazine. I let him wrinkle it a little, then I gave him a rattle or something distract him.

But what are you supposed to do in these situations, especially if you're kind of a pitiful, lonely adult who's out of place with these people who inexplicably invited you to join them at their Italian villa and you went there without your husband to get a break from your troubled marriage?

I saw this before a couple of years ago.

Watching it again, I'd definitely squeal on the teens.

I never enjoyed vacations until I started going alone.

Filmed on a Sony HVR-Z1 ($450 used on Adorama). The shots all seem to be static camera. Filmed with a prosumer camcorder and a tripod.

Written and directed by Joanna Hogg.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Lori Loughlin worried about reputation

Lori Loughlin looking for a crisis manager to help cope with the damage to her reputation.

To me, just having an "influencer" for a daughter is the main blow to her reputation. Not much she can do about that. But then again, I never heard of her before this. 

Angelica Huston interview

From an article about Angelica Huston's interview on Vulture.

Oprah hates her:

Huston, the daughter of director John Huston, revealed that Oprah has never spoken to her, and never invited her onto her talk show, most likely because she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Prizzi’s Honor, beating Winfrey’s performance in The Color Purple.

“She never had me on her show, ever. She won’t talk to me,” Huston says.

“The only encounter I’ve had with Oprah was when I was at a party for the Academy Awards, a private residence. I was talking to Clint Eastwood, and she literally came between us with her back to me. So all of the sudden I was confronted with the back of Oprah’s head.”

Woody Allen:

“Two states investigated him, and neither of them prosecuted him,” Huston says, and asked whether she’d work with him again, she adds: “Yeah, in a second.”

 Remember what I said about Cesar Romero's performance as the Joker being far more energetic than Jack Nicholson's?

“Bad cocaine makes you feel shitty. Probably makes you run for the loo because it’s laced with laxatives. Pure cocaine gives you a very light, airy, clear, and extremely pleasant feeling. But really, there’s no such thing as good cocaine. I don’t believe that people should take it recreationally. [Nicholson] never took overt amounts. He was never a guzzler. I think Jack sort of used it, probably like Freud did, in a rather smart way. Jack always had a bit of a problem with physical lethargy. He was tired, and I think probably, at a certain age, a little bump would cheer him up. Like espresso.”

Roman Polanski:

Asked about Roman Polanski – she was at Jack Nicholson’s house when the director raped a 13-year-old model, before fleeing the US – she said: “Well, see, it’s a story that could’ve happened ten years before in England or France or Italy or Spain or Portugal, and no one would’ve heard anything about it. And that’s how these guys enjoy their time.

“It was a whole playboy movement in France when I was a young girl, 15, 16 years old, doing my first collections. You would go to Régine or Castel in Paris, and the older guys would all hit on you. Any club you cared to mention in Europe. It was de rigueur for most of those guys like Roman who had grown up with the European sensibility.

“My opinion is: He’s paid his price, and at the time that it happened, it was kind of unprecedented. This was not an unusual situation. You know that movie An Education with Carey Mulligan? That happened to me. It’s about a schoolgirl in England who falls in love with an older dude, Peter Sarsgaard. My first serious boyfriend I met when he was 42 and I was 18.

“But these things happen, that’s what I’m saying. These things weren’t judged on the same basis that they’re judged on now. So you can’t compare them.”

I don't know to what degree she was defending Polanski. Some of the headlines characterized this as support for him, but she didn't say he was innocent, that he suffered any injustice, or that he should be allowed back in the country.

Pets & animals

Movies turned me off to pets and animals. They're like old people. They almost always die by the end of the movie. You see them being very helpful in adventure movies, but you know that in real life, if it were any animal you ever had, they would get lost in about five minutes and you'd never see them again, or you would be constantly struggling to keep them from getting lost or killed. That's the main thing you do as a pet owner anyway. You have to fight constantly to keep animals from getting out and killing themselves.

I was driving down the street. There was a cat sleeping in the street. I stopped and got out and chased it out of the street but when I went back to the car the stupid went back and lay down in the street.

I've had dogs that were just looking for a chance to get loose and run into traffic. I was once in a park and tried to help a couple who were trying to stop a dog from running into the highway.

Why do people want pets? Why do they want to be slaves to these animals? You can't go to bed early because you have to take them out. You can't sleep late because you have to get up and take them out. You can't leave the house for more than a few hours. 

Now, at work, we're struggling with a small, cute, vicious dog that will attack any stranger who walks in. A Fed Ex driver held his hand out for the dog to sniff so he'd calm down, and ended up in the emergency room for stitches. Their other dog, a rescue from a puppy mill, will only defecate indoors. 

Man I hate pets.

Happy May Day!

Venezuela has withstood another U.S. backed coup attempt. And the U.S. is blaming Russia. Because, they said, Russia told President Maduro not to flee the country. I'm not sure what that means. Russia has no power over him. If he thought he was being overthrown, why would he stay?

From Counterpunch.com:

The failure of the latest coup plotted so carefully in the war rooms of the White House, Pentagon and CIA was pre-ordained as soon as it became clear that Washington’s chosen puppet Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez was nothing more than a creation of theirs, meant to do the bidding of the plotters in DC. 

By the time Guaidó appeared on a bridge in Caracas flanked by the opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, whom defecting Venezuelan soldiers had reportedly released from house arrest where he had been sentenced for fomenting violence, along with a handful of troops from one unit, many of whom, reportedly, had been tricked into showing up by their commanding officers, and who fled when they realized they were being asked to shoot at fellow soldiers of the Venezuelan military, Guaidó’s attempt to create a coup by televising a staged one was already collapsing around him. 

In short order, troops and officers who had supported Guaidó began entering foreign embassies like Brazil’s and Chile’s and Spain’s, seeking asylum. Opposition leader Lopez, who clearly recognized the coup had failed, left Guaido’s side quickly and, with his family, sought asylum in the Chilean embassy, later moving with them to the nicer and perhaps safer quarters of the Spanish embassy. 

...

How this will all play out at this point is too early to tell. Will Guaidó end up being arrested and tried for treason for this latest move on his part? Will he be plucked to safety and spirited away to the US by some daring Navy Seal rescue? Will he hide out in the Brazilian or Colombian embassy? It’s hard to say but after this disaster, his utility to his Washington handlers is zero, so he’ll likely be on his own at this point. If he’s lucky he won’t end up being denied asylum in the US by the Trump Immigration Office as just another Latin American moocher, which in his case would be a uniquely accurate characterization. 

...

As with Cuba, long a target of American economic warfare, the people of Venezuela know who is making their lives miserable, and that it is the same imperial power across the Caribbean that just attempted to steal their elected government and impose one subservient to its own interests. 

And it looks like they have once again foiled Washington’s attempt to accomplish this.
If any foreign powers come out looking good in this farce of a coup it is Russia and Cuba, both of which stood by Venezuela despite threats from the US. 

Those two countries certainly a lot better than the 50 governments — puppets all — that bowed to US pressure and recognized the pathetic unelected Guaidó as the “legitimate president” of Venezuela and that now look like fools and stooges.

Joe Biden will be a disaster

Hunter Biden considered this a date.

I talked with my brother. He enthused over Joe Biden running for president. I pointed out that we now know that the reason he didn't run last time was that his son, Hunter Biden, had dumped his wife and children and was sleeping with his dead brother, Beau Biden's, widow. This was revealed after the election.

Hunter Biden was the one who joined the Navy in a special program that allowed him to take a two week course and become an instant officer. He had to get two waivers for this to happen---he was too old and had a drug incident in his past. But he was allowed in and he made a public statement about how proud he was to be in the Navy. A month later, he tested positive for cocaine and was kicked out.

Hunter Biden is now on the board of Ukrainian energy company which was under investigation for corruption. He was receiving large wire transfers of cash from them.

Joe Biden, as vice president, was in charge of Obama's policy towards Ukraine and he publicly bragged about how he ordered the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor investigating the company. He was there in the Ukraine, he told government officials that he was leaving in six hours, and if the man wasn't fired by the time he left, they wouldn't get a billion dollar loan from the United States. "And son of a bitch, they fired him."

My brother was an enthusiastic Biden supporter. He responded that this would have all been normal for the Trump family.

Which is rather astonishing. It's why the Democrats will lose. First they worship these politicians, then it turns out it's only because they (in theory) are slightly less corrupt that the ghastly Trump family. They're infuriated that people don't rush to the polls to vote for the candidate who might be only slightly less corrupt or murderous than the worst president imaginable.

Hillary Clinton's only real campaign promise was war with Syria and, therefore, Russia. And her only real attack on Trump was for his "temperament". He could start a war!

And they despise anyone who voted for Bernie Sanders.