Moonshine Mountain (1964)

I had this theory based on viewing the movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis. It was that, if you have no talent at all, you can do pretty well if you make a movie that's just an excuse for a series of nude, sex or gore scenes.

I doubt it would work now. Porn is everywhere and Hollywood is awash with big budget gore.

I wondered if it would work with something more innocuous. Like, say, hillbilly music---if you did a movie that was just an excuse for a series of scenes with hillbillies playing their music. No. It wouldn't work.

Just forget my Herschell Gordon Lewis theory.

I just watched Lewis's Moonshine Mountain. A singer goes to the mountains of North Carolina. Hangs around with horrible, obnoxious, overbearingly friendly but simultaneously menacing and violent Southerners. They keep playing guitars and singing. Absolutely awful.

Ed Wood wasn't that bad. Plan 9 was entertaining. It had five storylines that all came together in the end. It was well photographed and nicely edited, and back then horror movies were all intended for children. Look at Roger Ebert's outraged review of Night of the Living Dead. He watched it in a theater full of traumatized children. You think children of the 1950's would notice any flaws in Plan 9?

Wood's next movie, The Sinister Urge, was fine. The exterior scenes were filmed outdoors, it had a crowd scene and a car wreck. I liked the girls in it. They leave church Sunday morning and beat up a guy because he hadn't paid for the pornographic pictures the criminals had supplied him.

Phil Tucker's Dance Hall Racket, Lenny Bruce, 1953

After watching Robot Monster, decided to watch another Phil Tucker film released around the same time called Dance Hall Racket starring Lenny Bruce.

I don't know about Lenny Bruce. His delivery must have been amazing because nothing he ever said was funny.

I saw Dustin Hoffman play him in a movie. He was outraged that they fired a gay teacher, because, he said, we NEED good teachers. Just because the guy was gay doesn't mean he was a good teacher. Maybe the school had no problem with gay teachers but used it as an excuse to get rid of an abusive incompetent.

I also remember a scene where Lenny Bruce buys a new Cadillac with money he got from an insurance payout after a car accident. At the time I thought it was a sign of bad taste. My parents always frowned on garish luxury cars. Now I kind of like them. Still, I would have bought a used car and tried to live as long as I could on what was left.

Then there was Lenny Bruce's pioneering use of the N-word. He thought that saying it repeatedly in front of a small, white nightclub audience would inure people to it so that it would no longer be hurtful to Black people. I don't think it worked.

I'm afraid that Dance Hall Racket was no Robot Monster. Filmed in master shots.

Lenny Bruce is a bouncer in a dance hall who murders a guy. It threatens to expose the dance hall as a front for a diamond smuggling operation. With Timothy Farrell. Two women are fighting in the movie as I write this.

CNN's "The Movies"

From Andy Kindler's State of the Industry Address:

"I don't know if you've seen CNN's new show, List of Movies."

That was all he said specifically about the series, The Movies. That was the first thing I've seen that dismissed it completely. I'm still astonished that people were enthusing over that crap.

Lion King talk on the radio

I just listened to something on public radio. They were talking about the new Lion King movie. They had a woman on who had a blog about Disney movies past, present and future. For some reason I assumed she was anti-Disney. She wasn't, of course.

"They didn't just pull this out of their bottom," she said of the photo-realistic animation.

Someone else pointed out that realistic animal faces aren't the least bit expressive.

It reminded me of this quote from Werner Herzog from his documentary, Grizzly Man:

“And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.”

I haven't seen either version of The Lion King. A critic they interviewed said that he wished the new movie had taken off on its own and not stuck so closely to the plot of the original, but they couldn't, he said, because the plot of the original was so well-known. I thought it was based on Hamlet.

Robot Monster (1953)

See? This is why I can't be taken seriously.

I'm watching Robot Monster, considered one of the worst movies ever made, and I liked it.

It's rather grim, like Schindler's List for children of the early '50's.

The human race has been almost completely wiped out by robots calling themselves "Ro-Men" from outer space. Six people survive, hiding out a short distance from the cave from which the Ro-Man is operating.

The family patriarch mentions suicide as an alternative for the family. The Ro-Man, meanwhile, is beginning to have doubts about the whole genocide thing.

It had only eight actors in it. I was a bit surprised that they each had a long list of credits on imdb.com. It wasn't like an Ed Wood movie full of actors who never appeared in anyone else's films. The little girl was the only one with no other credits.

Actress Selena Royle was one of the stars and Elmer Bernstein composed the music. Royle had been blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and Bernstein had been greylisted as a leftist.

The Ro-Man was a guy in a gorilla suit with a space helmet. It was stupid, but he moved around more freely than other movie robots.

Made in four days for $16,000 ($152,000 today). Filming in 3D reportedly added over $4,000 to the budget. Filmed almost entirely outdoors with stock footage from various other movies.

The thing reportedly grossed about a million dollars but it sounds like they ripped off the director and didn't give him his cut.

Poor Alfalfa

Carl Switzer in a different role some years later.

I turned on this movie called The Great Mike, a B movie made by PRC, the most impoverished of the poverty row studios.

A kid has a horse named Mike. He and his friend played by Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, use him to deliver newspapers. But the kid is convinced Mike would make a great racehorse.

Alfalfa appeared to have reached his full adult height. You know how former child actors don't always modify their acting styles as they get older? Well, it looked like Alfalfa did update his acting but went in the wrong direction. The poor guy was just awful.

Alfalfa died in 1959 at age 31. He was a mean kid playing a nice kid in the Little Rascals. He had a bad temper. He had become a hunting guide. He borrowed a guy's hunting dogs. One got lost and he offered a $50 reward for the dog's return. He got the dog back and paid the reward, but some time later, after a few drinks, he decided that the dog's owner owed him $50 so he and a friend went to his house and forced their way in to collect the debt. The guy had a gun. He and Alfalfa wrestled over it until they fired a shot into the ceiling. Alfalfa stopped then and decided to leave and that was when the guy shot and killed him.

His older brother, Harold Switzer, had also been a child actor. He later operated a franchise installing and servicing commercial washing machines. He killed a customer in a dispute then drove into the desert and killed himself in 1967 at age 41.

Alfalfa vs James Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life.

Lil Quinquin

It had been a mini-series on French TV which is why it's three and a half hours long.

A murder mystery of sorts. It made me think of an old episode of Picket Fences where the cops raid a farm and find that cows are being impregnated with human fetuses. This is at the other end of the life cycle. Dismembered murder victims are being crammed into the bodies of dead cows.

Lil Quinquin himself is a racist kid about twelve who runs around with his racist friends. They abuse and attack a couple of Muslim kids, they mock and harass a girl who sang in a talent show. He lives in a farm with his parents, grandparents and developmentally disabled uncle while the sheriff and his assistant drive around in a small Citroen investigating the crime in their way.

Set in Norther France across the channel from England.

I didn't know what to say about it so I looked at comments on imdb.com. I was surprised that people hated it. I rather enjoyed it.

Quinquin was played by an odd-looking little fellow with a crooked mouth. His nose looked like it had been smashed against his face. He was cute in his way. He had a little girlfriend. 

The actor, Alane Delhaye, has only one other screen credit, another miniseries where he plays the same character as a grown-up, apparently now a fascist attending meetings of the Nationalist party.

In a way, after the hours and hours of MSNBC I've had to sit through, it would probably be refreshing to have, say, a Trump supporter in a movie and to have that presented it as neutral information, without explicitly condemning or supporting or explaining it in any way. I took this movie to be anti-racist. At one point, the racist kids feel some sympathy for the Black kid they've been persecuting, but they don't have a total change of heart, and in the sequel they've apparently become full-blown fascists. 

The kids are such little bastards anyway, it would be out of character to have them be anything else.

I've said before that every French movie makes France look like a hellhole. This one makes it LOOK kind of nice. They have a lovely town, quaint farms. The police have their quirks but aren't monsters. But the casual yet violent racism ruined it.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Rutger Hauer. RIP

Rutger Hauer has died at age 75.

The first thing I saw him in was Keetje Tippel. I watched it at the university when I was in high school.

When VCRs took over, he was kind of like Klaus Kinski. You'd go into the foreign section of the videostore and see his name on boxes for European arthouse films. A few feet away in the horror and action sections, you'd see him in less sophisticated Hollywood films.

Trump, Epstein, Paris Hilton

Whatever happened to Paris Hilton?

Connie Chung, Maury Povich, David Letterman

With the stuff from Trump--that people who criticize him or Israel should go back where they came from--I looked up Connie Chung.

You might recall that in 2002, Chung had interviewed Martina Navratilova. Navratilova had criticized the Bush regime and Chung accused her being "un-American" and "unpatriotic". She told her to go back Czechoslovakia.

"Well, you know the old line, love it or leave it," Chung said cleverly.

Navratilova had been a U.S. citizen for twenty years and Czechoslovakia had ceased to be a country nine years earlier.

So I googled Chung's name, and it seems that her scumbag husband, Maury Povich, had been talking about David Letterman a few years ago. Whenever Chung was on Letterman's show, he would pretend to be in love with her and kept referring her husband by the wrong name---Murray or Morty. Connie Chung and Mr Connie Chung took this seriously. Povich is describing this as a "feud" with Letterman.

And websites treated this as a big revelation.

Chung worked in the same building as Letterman and whenever they needed a guest, quick, they'd drag her in.

Anyone who took Connie Chung seriously had to have been bemused that she was married to Povich, host of A Current Affair. He went from there to doing an especially trashy daytime talk show.
 
According to Wikipedia, Chung was born in the US "less than a year" after her parents moved here from China. She may have been conceived outside the United States. Who is she to tell anyone to go back where they came from?

A biographical film a kid was going to make

"Why don't you and your cherry tree get a room?"

I was in a biography class in high school. We had to write a "chapter" of a biography of someone. But the teacher said we could do something else. Something creative. Make a movie, perhaps.

Without a thought, a kid jumped at it. He'd make a movie! He knew nothing about it. I told him that used movie cameras sold for $5 at Goodwill. A roll of film from a drug store was seven dollars plus three dollars for processing.

I told him that recording live sound was more trouble than it was worth and that you could get used splicers and editors at Goodwill, too, but they were harder to come by. I didn't tell him that editing wasn't worth the trouble, either. He could film in sequence and when the film came back from the lab, there it would be---his finished work!

I didn't know the guy. I didn't have the impression that he knew anyone who would act in it. I have no idea who the subject of his biography was or how he was going to film a chapter of his or her life.

I don't know what I would have done back then, but thinking about it now, I would have made a short film called "The Time George Washington Threw a Silver Dollar Across the Potomac River For Some Reason".

I just googled it. It turns out that Washington allegedly threw a piece of slate the size a silver dollar (dollars didn't exist at that time) across a different river that was 250 feet across---not physically impossible and not nearly as stupid as throwing away a dollar. In 1800, a dollar was worth twenty dollars in today's money.

Just get an actor. Find a frilly shirt for him in the ladies' department at Goodwill. And find a pair of pumps and women's pedal pushers. There's a river about a mile from the school.

Poke around the used records at Goodwill. Look for classical music, preferably with harpsichord, that would be suitable for film of a teenage boy mincing around a river bank in drag.

Chopping down the cherry tree

George Washington chopped down his father's favorite cherry tree. But why? I would have made it a Cain and Abel thing. His father loves the cherry tree more than he loves his son, so little George Washington murders it. And to make it more historical, I'd have him order a slave to chop it down for him.

Ray Nazarro

Ray Nazarro (left).

I turned on a Ray Nazarro movie last night. He directed scores of B westerns from 1929 to 1958. After '58, he started directing TV shows.

The movie was made by Columbia Pictures in 1946. Nazarro directed 13 movies that year. Rather astonishing. They weren't the greatest movies in the world, I'm sure, but they weren't terrible.

Woody Allen's movie-a-year doesn't seem so great anymore now, does it? Yes, I know. Allen writes his movies, too, and he wins an occasional Oscar. But his movies don't have stunts.

Wikipedia says that Nazarro went on to direct spaghetti westerns, but that's not true. Hiring an American B movie director would defeat the whole purpose of having spaghetti westerns. They were all directed by Italian Communists. They had American stars, not American directors.

I don't know why B westerns were so bad. They're full of violence. They kill people freely. They should be good. If anybody thinks "political correctness" is ruining movies, show them a few of these things.

I guess their problem is that they were made for children. Like horror movies used to be. Read Roger Ebert's original review of Night of the Living Dead. He saw it as part of a triple feature on a Saturday afternoon in a theater full of children. He was outraged.

 

 

 

 

This may be from the movie I saw. It had the overweight guy in it.

Modern Family

I've grown weary of Modern Family. It's a bit like Arrested Development in that the characters each have a single quirk they use in every episode. I looked online and was surprised that everyone liked Phil so much and really hated Manny.

I liked Luke as a child. Being dumb and insensitive can be cute in children but is alarming in adults, especially body builders. There was an episode where he takes a pro-date rape position in an argument with Manny.

But, look, each episode is 21 minutes when you take out commercials and each one has a main plot and two subplots which are given equal emphasis. So the episodes cut between three storylines that are about seven minutes each. They imply a lot more than they show and cover the gaping holes in the plot by cutting away to another storyline.

It reminds me of that interview I saw with one of the producers of Baywatch. The interviewer was terribly impressed that the guy had written an episode, but the producer dismissed it.

A script is three minute scenes, he said. I can write a three minute scene.

If you can write a seven page script, you can write a script with this structure.

They did this to some degree on the old half-hour TV dramas.

It occurred to me that this would be an easy way to write a script for a short film. I googled it and found that someone else had the same revelation. I don't know if I should feel bad that I didn't have a unique idea or think that I'm not so dumb since someone else had the same thought.

I watched a seven minute video on YouTube made by teenagers. It was based on a Hardy Boys book. If they could intercut it with a Nancy Drew story they'd really have something. I can't think of a third teenage detective.

A vaguely painful memory

Now a strange memory is coming back to me. I was in high school. My friends were laughing at me. One of them had drawn a picture of me saying, "I'm not so dumb!" The cartoon implied that I had a really avid interest in the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. What did they mean? What were they suggesting?

Chet Haze the smart one in the Hanks "family"?

Tom Hanks is executive producer of CNN's series "The Movies".

It's astonishing to me that people are gushing over this crap. If the internet is to be believed, the public loves CNN's The Movies.

Surely this isn't sincere. Looking online, the comments enthusing over the series are too slick. Like they're all from CNN itself.

Even the people who don't like it are being overly polite.

From Indiewire:

Any self-respecting TCM watcher is too sophisticated for this breezy look at “The Movies.” Clearly the producers are trying to draw younger audiences who might be vaguely familiar with some of the movies here, from Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” to Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull.” (Both directors are on hand to comment.) Snobby old Hollywood lovers sometimes forget that for today’s 18-year-old film fan devouring classic films made before they were born, Tom Cruise’s “Risky Business” is more ancient than Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night” was to their counterpart in 1970.

The Killer/O Matador (2017)

So late last night I turned on a Brazilian western. It was a Netflix Original. It was set in the early 20th century. They had regular guns, relatively modern revolvers and bolt action rifles. There was a 1930's airplane. It had French people.

But it was far more violent than a regular western. They killed a few animals in it---at least there were dead animals in it. If they killed them onscreen, I didn't watch. I fast forwarded through some of the more extreme violence.

The poverty was worse than most westerns.



A baby is abandoned in the wilderness. He's found by a local bandit called "Seven Ears" because has the seven ears of some guys he murdered on a necklace. The baby grows up completely isolated in a mud hut. In this way, he becomes a killing machine perfectly suited to the nightmare world of the movie, but it's hard to identify with the caveman-like character.

There must be a better way to become an Übermensch. Look at Sergeant York. That guy was a killing machine but he wasn't a monster.

Really depressing.

Jeffrey Epstein, R Kelly, John Landis

I was pleasantly surprised that Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and now R Kelly. I know nothing about R Kelly so I listened to a few seconds of him on YouTube singing something about believing he can fly. It's hard to imagine anyone defending him because of his music, but people defended John Landis murdering two first graders because he directed The Blues Brothers.

I don't know why anyone would defend Epstein. Is he a Zionist? Why is Dershowitz defending him? Is it just for the money or was there something else Epstein provided him with?

As Vicky Ward disclosed in an excellent piece for the Daily Beast, Alex Acosta told the Trump’s vetting team that he was told to go lightly on Epstein because he was “above his pay grade” and that “he belonged to intelligence.” Given Epstein’s enduring relationship with Dershowitz, we can perhaps deduce the intelligence agency with which Epstein was allied…

From Counterpunch.com

Epstein was a business partner of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Barak hooked Harvey Weinstein up with an Israeli intelligence firm to silence the women he raped and assaulted. Weinstein was the Simon Wiesenthal Center's 2015 Humanitarian of the Year.

There was also this bit of information:

How small is the world of the rich, the powerful and the perverted? AG William Barr had to recuse himself from the Epstein case because his law firm once represented Epstein and Barr’s father, who ran an elite prep school in NYC, hired Epstein to teach math to high school boys and girls, even though Epstein lacked a college degree. Barr’s father later was removed by the trustees after a pattern of such questionable employments decisions was unearthed.

Back when John Landis was on trial, I was the only one I knew who thought he should be locked up. It was in the days before the internet, so I had no way of knowing what anyone else thought. I assumed everyone was pro-Landis. But now you look at the comments section of anything online about that scumbag and people haven't forgotten it. I was aware that there had been a crackdown on celebrities in Hollywood back then. They found themselves being prosecuted for things that would have been ignored before, but I didn't relate it to a backlash against Landis's acquittal.

It didn't seem to affect Landis' career. He was banned from working with children for two years but as soon as the time was up, he directed Macaulay Culkin in a Michael Jackson video.

Nike's Betsy Ross shoes

I have a friend in Russia who translated the routine of a Russian comedian for me. The guy had been to the United States. He mentioned that there were American flags everywhere here. There was even American flag underwear. He says that when Russians put flags on their underwear they do it as a form of protest.

That's what I thought of when I heard about the American flag shoes Nike was going to produce. Wouldn't a flag hat be more respectful?

There was an episode of The Courtship of Eddie's Father where Bill Bixby was troubled that woman made a teddy bear out of an American flag.

When the Supreme Court overturned laws against flag desecration, a guy in Oregon went to court to have his criminal conviction for having an American flag seat cover overturned.

Abbie Hoffman appeared on TV in an American flag shirt and the network obscured it with a black box.

He was ARRESTED for wearing that shirt.

So these right-wingers getting their American flag panties in a bunch over Nike deciding against putting out Betsy Ross shoes---THEY'RE the traitors here if you ask me.

CNN The Movies vs Mark Cousins' The Story of Film

I just watched a little of that CNN The Movies "original series". They'd been advertising it and my mother wanted to see it.

We missed the first half. I think, because we're watching on Roku and it came on at nine o'clock eastern time.

It was about what I expected. For some reason, they started with movies of the 1980s, and they talked only about Hollywood.

"You know, this is just awful," I said.

She agreed.

I was already on Hulu so I found The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins fifteen-part documentary series from the UK.

I think I have it on DVD somewhere but we watched it on Hulu. It seemed like there were a lot of commercials. I was a little surprised that my mother liked it as much as she did. Mark Cousins' pleasant Irish accent didn't hurt anything.

We watched the first part, up to 1918, then her cousin called and we stopped it.

The time that class went to see Schindler's List

They had to change the end of the Israeli version of Schindler's List because Israelis kept laughing at it. Seinfeld made a joke out of how reverent people were about a Steven Spielberg movie.

I remember this incident. Black kids in Oakland went on a field trip. They were going to see a movie. No one told them what it was and they didn't know until the movie came on the screen, but it turned out to be Schindler's List.

The movie got off to a slow start. There was a surprising amount of sex. Then the violence started. They were shocked when the Nazis murdered a woman but one laughed because the actress oversold it and flopped around more than necessary.

I knew a couple of guys who laughed at Robert Shaw dying a far worse death in Jaws and no one accused them of anything.

I just listened to a story about this incident on This American Life.

So, anyway, these poor kids were kicked out of the theater. As they walked out, one reverent white audience member was so deeply moved by Spielberg's opus on Nazism and the evil of racism that he told them to "go back to Africa."
 
There was a press conference later and the kids apologized, but people were still mad at them for not apologizing for---I don't know---being Nazis?

Polanski's The Pianist started with the city being bombed. You knew what it was about from the start because the protagonist was Jewish---not a Nazi like in Spielberg's movie.

What does it tell you about Schindler's List that anyone who didn't already know the plot spent almost a full hour wondering what the hell it was about? Princess Margaret walked out of it because she thought it would be about a nice German man (the British royal family is German).

It seems ridiculous, audiences reverently watching as Nazis talk about opening a factory.

Be careful of moral outrage, especially if the outrage is against kids, especially if they're frequent targets of racism anyway. Especially if the demand is reverence for Steven Spielberg.

Angela (1995)

About a ten-year-old girl and her six-year-old sister. Their mother is schizophrenic and the older girl is beginning to show signs of it. She keeps seeing Satan in her room, a guy who's all white with huge wings and cloven hooves.

You know that B-movie technique they used to do? They would have two actors, one in the foreground, one in the background, and they were both facing the camera. They would carry on a conversation without looking at each other.

They did that in this movie, except the girl was talking to the devil. Which didn't make sense. He WAS a figment of her imagination, wasn't he? Why could we see him when she wasn't looking at him?

Directed by Rebecca Miller. Available on the Criterion Channel.

Pauline Kael

Long ago, I had a book of movie reviews by Pauline Kael. It wasn't very useful or interesting to me. I wasn't surprised that some critics liked her work, but why did they like it so much?

I just read a several articles written over the years about her. One was on a Feminist website and thought being female and obnoxious made her a Feminist heroine. Others pointed out her ethical problems (reviewing movies she consulted on), her inability to understand complex movies, that David Lean didn't make a movie for fourteen years after an especially unpleasant meeting with her. She knew nothing about film technique and therefore claimed that readers had no interest in that.

When Christopher Hitchens died, a couple of people observed that he had an outsized influence over his followers because he never showed the slightest self-doubt.

Around that time, I read a couple of articles about Robert McKee that said the same thing about him. He would make pronouncements that were clearly wrong---in one case he claimed that all horror movies had the same structure---but people would buy every word.

It sounds like Pauline Kael belongs in the same category. She was often wrong, she actually damaged people's careers and therefore cinema itself, but seemed so positive about any thought that flashed in her mind, she must have been right.

They're still talking about her, but her influence died with her. If you're a critic, no matter how many books of movie reviews you leave in your wake, when you're gone, you're gone.

Frogs (1972)

Ray Milland is the villain in this environmental horror movie. With Sam Elliot and Joan Van Ark.

I must have been nine when this thing hit theaters. I remember seeing the ad and being amazed that it was rated R. I couldn't believe anyone 17 or older would watch anything that stupid.

The ad made it look like it was about a giant, man-eating frog which would have been worth watching. But they were---well, why talk about it. It was just crap.

What little music that was in it was by Les Baxter. I have several of his CDs. Mike and George Kuchar freely used his music in their underground movies.

Ray Milland is a horrible rich guy who lives in a mansion alongside a swamp. His family gathers to celebrate his birthday. He's mean to everyone and he has hired someone to get rid of the annoying frogs, so the frogs kill everyone, and good for them.

"For all our technology and with all my money we still can't get rid of these frogs," Milland says.

Alfred E Newman

Apparently, Mad Magazine stole Alfred E Newman from a postcard printed in the 1940s then had to find an older version of it, old enough that the copyright had expired rendering it public domain.

These came from an article in the Paris Review, available here.

From an ad for a heroin-laced pain reliever.

Mad magazine coming to an end

When I was a kid, I used to keep up with movies by reading Mad Magazine. There were movies and TV shows I had never seen that I still knew about, that I could still recognize if I saw them on TV, because I read spoofs of them in Mad. 

Now, finally, after all these years, Mad is going belly up. Going the way of the dodo.

In the early seventies there were a lot fewer James Bond movies than there are now, but they did all the James Bond movies in one article. Which meant that each movie had to be boiled down to two or three panels. One, I think, was done in a single panel. I tried to do this myself, writing stories, drawing comics, which implied way more than they showed, which cut the story down to the smallest number of key scenes. Tell your story doing as little work as possible. Just do the beginning and the end. Or just show the end. 

Later, I kept up with movies I didn't go to by watching Siskel & Ebert. They're long gone and all I have left is reading descriptions on Netflix which is quite a bit less informative.

The Mad movie satires had a longer half life than he work of movie critics. Critics retire or pass away and it's like they never existed. Anybody read Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert these days? Mad would reprint their stuff for years.

I did my part to keep it going. I think I've had a couple of subscriptions in the last twenty years. Whenever kids came to the door selling magazine subscriptions for school fundraisers, there was nothing I'd want so I'd subscribe to Mad. I don't know if I even read them. I should have given the kids a direct cash contribution.

Arte Johnson RIP

I shouldn't have written that thing about Lee Iococca dying at 94 because I'm sorry to report that Arte Johnson has died at 90.

When I was four or five, my mother had some idea of my brother and I auditioning for something she heard about. She draped a throw over a chair and we were supposed to appear behind it and said "Very interesting...but stupid." I knew the line from Arte Johnson on Laugh In, but I didn't know what I was doing wrong.  Was I saying "int'resting" instead of "in-ter-esting"? Could I not do a German accent? Was I not squinting?

We didn't audition for whatever it was and thank God for that. I would probably have liked being a child actor if it didn't involve acting. It just sounds awful.

Don't hold fireworks in your hand while lighting the fuse

It was finally explained to me why kids keep getting maimed by large fire crackers exploding in their hands. They light fuse and wait for it to burn down so they could throw it and see it explode in the air, but the fuses aren't designed for that. They don't burn at a uniform speed. They'll burn halfway at a nice steady rate then suddenly burn down to nothing and explode.

I don't know anyone who this happened to, but I worked with a girl who had a friend in high school---they all politely ignored his mangled hand and she never had the bad taste to ask anyone what happened to him, but someone finally told her. He had been playing with gun powder.

It's kind of horrifying. I knew kids who did that. One was into photography and talked about how film cans made great bombs! He said he would light them and throw them off a bike bridge. It was by sheer chance that he wasn't horribly injured.

I don't have children. But what should you do? Explain this to them? Because I'd be afraid of giving them the idea of making bombs with film cans.

There was a period where I liked fireworks but didn't like how much they cost. Then I lost all interest in fireworks. Then I had my grandmother who was around 100 who couldn't really go anywhere or see very much. So I'd buy about $100 worth of fireworks and set it off for her on the fourth of July.

I also got out a movie projector and an extension cord. I projected an old school movie onto the side of the house. It was called The Pledge of Allegiance. It was just shots of American flags in various places---a kid had one on his tricycle---and Jay North and Margaret O'Brien recite the Pledge of Allegiance a few times each on the soundtrack.

After my grandmother died, I lost all interest again.

Evil butcher Lee Iococca dead

Lee Iococca has died at age 94. He was the monster who knowingly decided to produce the Ford Pinto with a defect which resulted in people burning to death in their cars because it would save a few dollars per car, who is on tape telling Richard Nixon that, sure, seat belts save lives, but they're a waste of money. He convinced Nixon to kill regulations requiring airbags. He was a prominent opponent of the Clean Air Act.

Later, Iococca was in charge of Chrysler. Put out the ghastly K Car. It was promoted as showing that Chrysler was back after years of shoddy product. But within just a few years, the K-cars had all disappeared from the roads. They were terrible and they all fell apart. The K Car would make a pretty good movie gag---you could show a guy in 1981 proudly showing his neighbors his horrible new K Car. But they can't do it because none exist.

Iococca's masterpiece.

But dying peacefully in old age is the best you can hope for, death-wise. There's nothing to be terribly sad about when someone you like dies this way, and there's nothing to be happy about when it happens to a terrible, terrible person. No one was celebrating Mengele's death.

Woody Allen directs opera

No word on how Dylan and Ronan are taking this

According to AP:

Woody Allen said Tuesday as he prepared for his directing debut at Milan's La Scala opera house that he has "always had a warm and affectionate following in Europe."

Allen was greeted with applause at a news conference ahead of the weekend premiere at La Scala of Puccini's comic one-act opera "Gianni Schicchi" with the prolific filmmaker as director.

...

Alongside the La Scala production, a cinema museum in Milan is showing a retrospective of 28 Allen films. After Saturday's "Gianni Schicchi" premiere, Allen said he plans to travel to San Sebastian, Spain to work on his next film. The cast includes Christoph Waltz.

Allen said that his work "resonates with Europeans in a way that they relate to."

"I know when I started making movies 50 years ago or almost 50 years ago, for whatever reason I always had a very warm and affectionate following in Europe," he said. "And even when films of mine were not as well received in the United States, always in Italy, France and Germany, all over Europe, they received my films well."

...

Allen said he was persuaded by Placido Domingo to direct opera - but it took him a long time to come around.

"I didn't know if I had any ability to do this sort of thing. I had done cinema and not even that much stage work. I found it to be a very enjoyable experience," Allen said.

...

Allen's said he staged "Gianni Schicchi" in the neorealist style of 1950s directors like Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini -- after ideas to make Schicchi a rat among mice or a cigarette among organic produce were rejected.

He said he would have preferred a different ending for the opera, based on an incident in Dante's "Divine Comedy," which sees the title character condemned to hell for profiting from a ruse.

"I have a weakness for people who live on the margins of society and slightly outside of the law, so have I have great affection for Gianni Schicchi," Allen said. "I would not put him in hell at the end of the movie. I would retire him with a good pension and let him go off and lead a very happy life in the country. "

Brian De Palma

Tommy Smothers, Orson Welles, Brian De Palma.

After Paul Schrader's Facebook attack on Brian De Palma, I was inspired to watch a documentary--essentially a long, long interview with De Palma--on Netflix.

There were some interesting bits of information. Orson Welles appeared in one of his movies and never memorized his lines. I heard Welles had done that on Catch 22. Buck Henry said that Welles concealed the fact that he hadn't learned his lines by asking Mike Nichols to give him line readings---to tell him how he wanted him to say each line. That way Nichols would get the performance he wanted and it would go faster.

He discussed some of his failures, Feminist attacks on his work (which don't seem unreasonable) because he keeps murdering women in his movies.

But I don't know what Schrader's problem is. I have a terrible movie of his on TV as I write this, Dog Eat Dog. It starts with Willem Dafoe brutally murdering a mother and her young daughter while funny music plays on the soundtrack. And Schrader was 70 when he directed this stupidity. According to Wikipedia, it raked in a little over $69,000 at the box office.

Maybe Allen and Soon-yi threatened to sue

Some website calling itself "Showbiz Cheat Sheet" had an article entitled "Is Woody Allen Still Married to his Adopted Daughter, Soon-yi Previn?"

If she was his adopted daughter, why did she have Andre Previn's last name?

It took them a week or so, but they finally changed the headline to "Is Woody Allen Still Married to Soon-yi Previn?"

I read something on a Feminist website. They hated Woody Allen, of course. And, scrolling down to the comments, they all had all the facts wrong. One person was trying to correct the others because the misogynists would use the fact that they had no clue what they were talking about to defend Woody Allen. There was no suggestion that they rethink their views based on this.

Here's an odd bit of logic they keep using. They think the fact that Allen was never arrested, prosecuted or charged with any crime means that we don't know if he's guilty of anything because he didn't have a trial. Like if he had been charged with a crime and acquitted they might believe him.