Live and Let Die

 

I turned on Live and Let Die late last night. I watched a little. I didn't understand why James Bond was so worried about M catching him with a woman in his apartment. I realized that all I wanted to see was the speedboat chase in the end even though it dragged on too long and they kept cutting away to the funny sheriff. But it was a long, mostly dull movie and I didn't want to sit through it. I turned it off.

How many of these movies were about James Bond murdering Black people? I looked at a copy of the novel in a bookstore and was rather shocked. They had reprinted the British version which used an especially vile racial slur in one of the chapter titles.

Brand Upon the Brain, Guy Maddin, viewer comments

I posted something about this long ago---I had listened to an interview with Guy Maddin. He said at one point that he had read a bunch of comments on his work on IMDb and found it depressing. The reviews people posted were lousily written with bad use of the first person pronoun. Some people were annoyed by him, but the people who liked him apparently hurt his feelings, too.

I heard that and posted about it here and quoted him. I don't know how long ago that was. But for some reason it wasn't until a couple days ago that I bothered to read the comments he was talking about.

They were very long. Some of it was a little embarrassing. They should have been shorter, just hinted at an intellectual analysis. And, as Guy Maddin said, they should have laid off the first person pronoun.

Although. What are you supposed to do? Refer to yourself in the third person?

It makes me rethink some of the stuff I've written here. For example, my bitter attacks on the Utah-made family westerns Seven Alone and Against a Crooked Sky. I had seen Seven Alone when my entire school walked downtown to see it. I was surprised that you could show Indians being killed in a G-rated movie. I like violent movies, but I was generally on the Indians' side, especially against these terrible people. The father in the movie was in a constant rage. I didn't know why the children were upset when he finally had the good taste to drop dead. Everything seemed much more pleasant after that.

I thought Against a Crooked Sky was a sex movie. Why was the farm boy so attached to his suckling calf? Why was he spying on his naked sister? The movie made sure we knew the actress was really naked. She does that hand bra thing, holding a hand over each breast, then we see one buttock as she climbs out of the water. I would have assumed she was wearing a strapless one piece swimsuit if they hadn't done all that. She's kidnapped by Indians. The young fellow sets out to find her and is helped by Richard Boone who keeps talking about his Oedipal conflict with his son. "He took after his Ma," he said, which has more than one meaning. Boone says he murdered his son and they killed even more Indians in this movie and it still got a G rating.



People really liked Seven Alone. I almost never get comments, but they posted on here, enthused over it and didn't understand why I was slamming it. Maybe I was wrong.

Here's a filmmaking tip from Stewart Petersen, the Jean-Pierre Leaud of Utah regional cinema: If you film someone running barefoot in a field, put duct tape on the soles of their feet.

Any psycho-sexual elements in Guy Maddin's movies seem contrived. He knows what he's doing. With a movie like Against a Crooked Sky, the auteurs had no idea what perversity was gushing from their subconscious minds.

Against a Crooked Sky would have been pretty good if it had been silent, filmed in high contrast black and white, shot with several Super 8 cameras running at the same time and if the mother had been the villain.

No Greater Glory (1934)

Supposedly anti-war, but made it look fun. There was at least one Little Rascals short that seemed to be inspired by this. Based on the Hungarian novel A Pál utcai fiúk (The Paul Street Boys) about some sixth graders who fight a war with the junior high kids over what they keep calling a vacant lot although it's apparently used to store lumber. It seems like an extremely dangerous place for them to be using as a playground. Why don't they play in the railroad yard instead? According to Wikipedia, it's a popular young adult novel in Israel (at least among Jewish kids) which is pretty good reason to doubt it's really anti-war.

Like that West German movie, The Bridge, the first supposedly anti-war West German movie made after World War Two. It took the capitalist German movie industry until 1959 to decide that World War Two was bad. It could just as easily been considered pro-war except that some of the Nazis blub during the fighting. I've seen explicitly pro-war movies made during the war that were intended to spur enlistment that made it look far worse.

It's available on The Criterion Channel.

Don't Look Back (1967)

That's Allen Ginsberg in the background.

I promised myself some years ago that if I ever met Bob Dylan, I would act surprised and say Hi, how are you, good luck, but I wouldn't mean it.

Does he expect us to believe he can't sing any better than that?

Well. That's fine. I'm looking at Don't Look Back made by the late D.A. Pennebaker. I had seen it around 1980 late at night at the local arthouse. The place had been a old funeral home. I had no interest in Bob Dylan or music in general and I went with a friend who I don't think knew who he was. I don't know what drew us there. My friend seemed delighted by the film. I was on Dylan's side during the throwing the glass out of the window scene. He seemed like an awful person much of the time, but it seemed like an affectation and I don't know if that made it better or worse.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Trump and Biden: Two birds with one stone?

Hunter Biden is a degenerate. He left his wife and children so he could sleep with his brother's widow, in divorce court, his wife said that he spent vast amounts of money on drugs and "girlfriends". He joined the Navy in a special program that allowed to him to become an officer by taking two weeks of classes---they had to give him a couple of waivers because he was too old and had a "drug incident" in his past---he told the press how joining the Navy was the greatest moment of his life, then he was kicked out less than a month later because he tested positive for cocaine.

Nothing qualified Hunter Biden to go to work for Bursima Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, except that his father was in charge of the Obama regime's Ukraine policy. Hunter Biden was paid $50,000 a month for what, exactly, I don't know. The money was sent to him through a company owned by John Kerry's stepson.

Joe Biden told this hilarious anecdote to the Council on Foreign Relations about how he got a prosecutor allegedly investigating Bursima fired:

"I said, 'You're not getting the [$1 billion]. I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a bitch. He got fired." 

My hope is that Trump will be impeached and removed but, in self defense, he will end Biden's run for the nomination by exposing how corrupt he and his degenerate son are.

Oh, and after Trump is removed, I hope to heck Mike Pence will be severely weakened and unable to do anything as president. Because that guy won't be any improvement.

Remember that other thing?

They thought they had Trump on some illegal campaign contribution thing because they paid to stop a porn star from revealing her adulterous affair with him, but nothing came of it. It wasn't really a crime because Trump had non-campaign-related reasons to keep his adultery secret.


In this case it's already been suggested that Trump may have had legitimate reason unrelated to the election to want Ukraine to investigate corruption.

My view was always that four years isn't that long. We could just sweat it out and be rid of that guy soon enough. But if Biden gets the nomination, don't bet on Trump being voted out.

They're all such horrible people.

Anyone ever see this?

I was trying to find something about this---I think it may have been somebody's student film that somehow got into distribution as an educational film.

I'm usually pro-nudity. But this was apparently made around 1970. The movie begins with a Confederate soldier played by a hippie fleeing a battle. We don't see the battle, just one guy fleeing.

In those days, we thought hippies could play anything---they could represent characters in any era before the 1890s. Jesus looked like a hippie, George Armstrong Custer had hippie-length hair. Medieval peasants probably looked like hippies. Men had pony tails in the Revolutionary War.

So, this Confederate deserter goes to a river, takes his clothes off. He was scrawny and pasty. There was full frontal nudity as he jumps into the water. When he's out of the water, some Yankees shoot him naked.

After they kill him, some Union soldiers look through his stuff and one soldier is so upset he walks away so his sergeant shoots him.

Anybody know anything about this? I don't remember the title. It was 16mm color. I googled it and found nothing.

I saw this thing twice in high school, once in a film class and once in a class called "Death & Dying". The teacher warned us there was a naked man in it. He didn't tell us it was a gross naked man. It probably would have been okay if it had been a healthy, strapping Lil Abner-like Southerner.

I know this is sexist. I wouldn't attack a naked woman's appearance this way.

Why was a hippie in a pro-Confederate movie in the first place? For that matter, why was pretty much every Hollywood movie about the Civil War pro-Confederate? Disney was the only studio that wanted to preserve the Union and end slavery.

Orson Welles on Woody Allen

Orson Welles at an earlier stage of life.

Okay, so this is a transcript of someone reading a transcript. On the last two episodes of the Thought Spiral podcast, they read excerpts from the book My Lunches with Orson. Henry Jaglom recorded conversations with Orson Welles.

“Don’t you know there’s such a thing as physical dislike? Europeans know that about other Europeans. I don’t like somebody’s looks, I don’t like them. See, I believe that it’s not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m profoundly convinced that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.”

“Orson, that’s ridiculous.”

”Measure them! Measure them! I could never stand looking at Bette Davis so I don’t want to see her act, you see. I hate Woody Allen physically. I dislike that kind of man.”

“I’ve never understood why. Have you met him?”

“Oh yes. I could hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.”

“He’s not arrogant. He’s shy.”

“He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anyone who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself but he loves himself. A very tense situation to people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest.”

“Does he take himself very seriously?”

“Very seriously. I think his movies show it. To me it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world, a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on screen is therapeutic.”

“That’s why you don’t like Fosse, either. All that Jazz.”

“Yes, that’s right. I don’t like that kind of therapeutic [unintelligible]. I’m pretty catholic in my tastes, but there are some things I can’t stand.”

“I love Woody’s movies. That we would disagree on.  We disagree on actors, too. I could never get over what you said about Brando.”

“It’s that neck. Just like a huge sausage, a shoe made of flesh.”

Henry Jaglom has his own perverse ideas about race and ethnicity. He's a devout Zionist. He became enraged that anyone would dare criticize Israel for slaughtering Jenin refugee camp.

Welles' observation that people of different races look different doesn't seem especially novel. He had a large collection of putty noses he wore in every movie so I'm sure he was very judgemental about people's appearances.

I clicked on a Henry Jaglom movie a few days ago. Turned it off a few minutes in. But the logo for his production company was a picture of Orson Welles which just seems wrong.

THESE are the people you should study!

I read that one good reason to study great Russian literature is that there's not that much of it. You really want to slog through the mass of literature the French have churned out? Or even the English?

And now, in the last couple of entries, I watched two movies and thus plumbed the depths of director Michael A. DeGaetano's work. I tried to look the guy up but found no information about him.

Isn't that more satisfying than watching the movies of some big shot everybody already knows about?

There must be thousands of these guys. Look at IMDb.com. There are directors who made just a few movies and have no other credits. My guess is that most were independent filmmakers, that they either didn't do well enough with their earlier movies or had trouble raising more money or the whole movie-making thing was just more trouble than it was worth.

This seems to be the norm for movie careers. For most people, careers are slow to get started and quickly grind to a halt. Something you might think about before pouring money into a film school education. Is there anything you can do with a degree in movie production other than make movies or teach? It would probably make your job application stand out.

I had a cousin who had made a number of student films but had never had a job. He was looking for work and wound up working in a pizza place. I told him to put his student films on his resume as work experience. Focus on the organizational aspects rather that the artistic or technical side of the job. Tell how he checked out expensive pieces of equipment and returned them in good condition.

He didn't listen to me, of course. He probably would have had the most interesting resume of any applicant.

Haunted, 1977

You know the movie Monty Python's Meaning of Life? As I recall, one scene shows a man running through the streets being chased by topless young women. The narrator explains that he has been sentenced to death, that he was allowed to choose his own form of execution, and this was it.

The movie Haunted starts with an Indian woman in Arizona during the Civil War being executed for stealing a horse. They execute her by tying her to a horse and forcing her to ride topless through the desert until she dies. I assume it would kill the horse, too, so it's a pretty stupid penalty for stealing one.

Haunted was made in 1977 by Michael A. DeGaetano. I already watched his first movie, UFO Target Earth. IMDb shows he made three movies and I've now seen two of them.

It's a reincarnation story. The murdered woman comes back to kill the descendants of the people who executed her.

I couldn't find Haunted on Roku. There were DVD's of it for sale on Amazon---they sold for $35 and there was a used copy for over a hundred dollars. It apparently has a following, but the commenters on IMDb each had some clever put-down for it.

This should be troubling to future filmmakers. You can make a couple of reasonably good movies and get no respect whatsoever. You're Martin Scorsese or you're nobody. It looks like DeGaetano's directing career lasted five years.

I finally found it on YouTube and watched it there.

With Aldo Ray and Virginia Mayo. They live on an old movie set turned tourist attraction with Virginia Mayo's athletic sons who are in their twenties. They haven't had any tourists come around in years. Virginia Mayo's character is blind and losing her mind.

An actress shows up in an enormous Pontiac convertible. The two young fellows have an AMC AMX. They all sit down and eat dinner together, each with their own TV dinner.

It was more of a soap opera or a melodrama than a horror movie. Here. Judge for yourself:

https://youtu.be/6C1rnL5puYM

UFO: Target Earth (1974, 77 minutes)

Everyone hated it. I looked at IMDb.com and the comments were all negative, most of the commenters trying to be funny as they attacked it. They kept pointing out the boom mic visible at the top of the frame, although that was obviously because they filmed it in the 4x5 aspect ratio for release as a widescreen movie.

It had an appealing theme song.

As a kid, I was creeped out even by bad UFO documentaries and I probably would have been creeped out by this under the right conditions. The opening credits showed grainy, "real" UFO photos taken over the years. The movie begins with faux documentary footage of interviews with people describing their UFO sightings. We see a kid in bed complaining about a light that keeps appearing. His mother tells him he's dreaming and leaves him to his fate.

Filmed in Georgia. I assumed the director was a regional filmmaker from that area, but he made two other movies, a sex comedy in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and a movie about a witch in Arizona who gets even with the descendants of those who killed her a hundred years earlier. The witch movie had Aldo Ray and Virginia Mayo.

It's public domain. You can even do a remake.

I saw it on Roku on Pub-D-Hub, but it's available here on YouTube:

The President's Last Bang (South Korea, 2005)

I had read something long ago about art censorship. In South Korea, an art forger was arrested. He was making his own watercolor paintings and selling them as Picassos. He was arrested not for forgery or fraud, but for promoting Communism because Picasso was a Communist Party member.

They discuss this in this movie. They show members of the KCIA beating a man arrested for owning a painting by Picasso. They discuss how saying that you prefer the no-tax system in North Korea was a crime, and if someone tells you they prefer that system and you don't argue with them, you, too, have committed a crime.

Noam Chomsky was once smeared for equating Tiananmen Square to the mass killing of pro-democracy protesters in South Korea. More people were killed by the South Korean military than in China, so by equating the two, Chomsky was actually making Tiananmen Square look bigger than it was.

The President's Last Bang was about the assassination of South Korean president/dictator Park Chung-hee by KCIA director Kim Jae-gyu, perhaps with the permission of the Carter regime in Washington. They mention that Kim had met with officials at the US embassy shortly before this happened.

In one scene, the South Korean leader makes fun of Jimmy Carter for being a peanut farmer. How could they expect Carter to understand anything?

The KCIA director was in bad health and seemed to be upset at the killing of student demonstrators.

I had seen the movie several years ago, but my impression at the time was that the KCIA agents were just regular guys in suits who had a rather shocking task to perform.

Watching it now, the head of the KCIA who did the actual assassinating (as opposed to the others who murdered the bodyguards and a by-stander or two) carried it out for his own reasons and the others were thugs without a clear reason for going along with the plot.

An assassination isn't a revolution. The military junta that took over was no better and the guys who carried out the killings were tortured and executed.

The movie was censored by South Korea. Newsreel footage cut out so people wouldn't think it was a documentary or a true story.

In a way, it made it look so easy. If you were head of the KCIA and friends with the president and were having a party with him, all you needed was a willingness to do it. Even the director of security sitting at the table with Park was unarmed. It didn't require any genius.

[In Kind Hearts and Coronets (UK, 1949) the narrator mentions how difficult it is to murder someone you're not friends with.]

Maybe it would make a double feature with The Interview, the pro-assassination "comedy" Sony Pictures put out with the support of the U.S. government.

The Return of Draw Egan, 1916

Hey! Did Jim Jarmusch STEAL this?

I'm watching a 1916 western starring William S. Hart. He plays an outlaw named Draw Egan. He starts using the name WILLIAM BLAKE and becomes the sheriff of a town called Yellow Dog. He's recruited for the job in another town called Broken Hope.

In Jarmusch's western Dead Man, Johnny Depp plays a guy named William Blake. Goes to a town called Machine, which is nothing like the names Yellow Dog or Broken Hope except that it's an unlikely name for a town.

Saloon was less garish than later movie saloons.

The movie didn't resemble Dead Man in any way except for that. It was pretty good, really. Somewhat gritty, not like the later Tom Mix westerns.

Made in 1916, not long after the period in which the movie was presumably set. William Hart was born in 1864 (in New York, though) and became friends with Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson.

That was some shirt.

I always assumed movie westerns were wildly inaccurate. In this movie, their clothes didn't fit very well. Their hats were smaller than the absurdly large 1930's movie cowboy hats but mostly larger than the ones in the 1950's. But other than that, it was pretty much in line with all the other movies in that genre. The dialog was less clever.

Someone gets mad at William Hart for thinking he's too good to drink with them in the saloon.

Hart says that if he had known they let animals in the saloon, he would have brought his horse. Then he shoots him.

Anyway, it's available on the public domain Roku channel Pub-D-Hub if nowhere else.

Shane Gillis fired

So, SNL decided to pass on Shane Gillis. I listened to a bit of his podcast, and it was probably just as well that they fired him, although I don't know how harshly one should judge people trying to be funny in conversation on a podcast. Much of it was terribly disgusting and they sounded moronic.

And now that I look at it, the podcast was TWO WEEKS AGO. It was from September 3rd, 2019.

I was going to say that, if you say things that are disgusting and not funny, it could follow you for the rest of your life. But just following you for two weeks can be bad enough.

I don't know how much damage this has done Shane Gillis. He tweeted this:



He was good enough for SNL. You think he's been damaged severely enough that an independent filmmaker could get him to work cheap? Gillis would, I'm sure, be infinitely funnier than Dustin Diamond and he presumably wouldn't sexually harass cast and crew like Andy Dick. Those two guys keep getting work somehow.

On the other hand, Gillis might be more wary of making bad decisions that could wreck his career even more and avoid working with you.

Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Crossroads

You know 84, Charing Crossroads, about brassy New York writer Helene Hanff and her exchange of letters to with an English bookstore in the early 1950s? She writes to them, orders books, and eventually sends them food packages---Britain was under wartime rationing until they paid off their massive war debt.

She was a television writer. In the movie, she mentions writing episodes of Ellery Queen. I searched for some of the episodes she wrote but couldn't find any. I wondered if her work had been lost to time.

IMDb shows that she wrote a number of made-for-TV movies for Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Poked around You Tube. Found this one:

Shane Gillis

I'm not generally offended by people who inadvertently say something offensive. There was a kid in school who innocently said that the Jews killed Jesus. He didn't hold it against them. The ancient Jews certainly executed people in horrible ways for no good reason. The truth is, if they didn't kill Jesus, it was only because the Romans got to Him first.

There was poor Kelly Osbourne, dumb as she is, who blurted out something terribly offensive while attacking Donald Trump's racism. I saw Billy Connolly on Dennis Miller's old late night talk show---he tried to attack "political correctness" but blurted out that "we need MORE racism" then, realizing what he had said, talked and talked and talked trying to get out of it. When he was done, Dennis Miller complimented him on talking his way out of his pro-racism comment. I assume he wasn't actually calling for more racism.

I generally feel sorry for these poor dumb saps. Although Kelly Osbourne's thing was really awful.

But I decided a while back that I would just relax and go ahead and be offended by things that are intentionally offensive. Why not? I'm tired of pretending to be open-minded.

Most racist comments take the form of "jokes". Saying it's a joke is no excuse. How is it a defense for a comedian to say that he made his racist comments on stage speaking to an audience? Doesn't that make it worse? You can't judge Hitler if he was speaking into a microphone?

So, anyway, there's this fellow named Shane Gillis who got hired on Saturday Night Live who is now under attack for racist and otherwise rude things he's said on stage or on his podcast.

According to Variety:

In one episode about the Battle of Gettysburg, Gillis refers to screaming soldiers as “so gay” and uses the words “retard” and “faggot.” One joke finds Gillis and his co-host comparing “hot Southern boys” being raped in the Civil War to “having gay sex in jail.”

My first impression was that "screaming soldiers" referred to Confederates and their idiotic "rebel yell", although I don't know why I thought that. I'm not sure if I'm troubled by saying it was "so gay" in this instance. I'm old, so when they refer to "hot Southern boys" I assumed they meant especially attractive Confederate soldiers. I can't say I'm too concerned about a hypothetical Confederate male rape victim who's been dead a hundred years. To hell with those guys. I didn't know male rape was a thing in the Civil War, although I guess it must have been. There was no need to bring up "gay sex in jail".

But don't use the word "retard" in that way. We had some jackass in the local student paper defend his use of the term. There were comments from parents of developmentally disabled children who told him how painful this was to them. He said he only used it in casual conversation. Like anyone thought he was using it in formal discourse. And he finally backed down and said he'd quit doing it. I'm sure he was still rather insensitive, but at least he was capable of some self-improvement.

Like Shane Gillis. Let him reform himself. Then we can welcome him back with open arms into the human race.

On the other hand...

I don't know if that works in a highly competitive field. Do you get a second chance? Should they give you one when the world is full of talented people who never said terrible things?

In film, a filmmaker's first movie seems to set the course for their career. It could just be that the sort of movie you want to make when you start out is the sort of movie you want to continue making. But it could also be that that's the only sort of film anyone will consider you for.

There was an article about celebrities speaking to film school students. They kept advising them to drop out and make a movie. And this didn't seem like unreasonable advice. But if you make some zero budget horror movie now, will you really blossom a decade later and make serious big budget movies? Does anyone do that?

It could be that it doesn't make any difference---don't worry about your future success unless you have a real chance of achieving it.

In most careers, there's a clear continuum. Be careful how you start.

It's like me in that writing group. One of my English teachers from junior high school is there. He didn't like me at all in school and he hated the stories I wrote. Now he seems to like them, but as I see it, they're a late-middle age version of what I wrote as a kid. They're not really serious, they're heavy on the dialog with little description.

Eddie Money RIP

I really don't listen to music. I only knew who Eddie Money was because, in the early days of MTV, he had one of the few music videos which they played over and over.

I had friends who had MTV on all the time. One of them told me a lot of trivia about Money to explain his mannerisms.

Eddie Money died today at age seventy. I read about him and learned that everything my friend told me was a lie.

Two weeks in prison for Felicity Huffman

The Probation Department considered it a victimless crime, no one was hurt, "There was no actual or intended loss", and opposed any prison time for Felicity Huffman. But she's been sentenced to two weeks in jail for some reason. For tricking a private company into taking her money. If she kept someone else from getting into a high priced college, she saved a young person from decades of debt peonage. Felicity Huffman is a saint.

Town Without Pity (1961) again

So I watched this thing.

Dalton Trumbo did the final rewrite on the script (uncredited). I assumed it would be better than it was. But now I can see why I never heard of it before.

Kirk Douglas plays a sanctimonious defense attorney defending four rapists in the US Army in 1960 Germany. First he tells his "clients" how much he hates them because they raped a teenage girl. Then he defends them by ripping the girl apart for things that have nothing to do with the crime. She was alone in the woods changing out of her two piece swimsuit. She was bare naked. No wonder they raped her.

He pleads with the girl's father not to let her testify so he won't have to humiliate her on the witness stand. What a nice guy.

Wikipedia gave away the ending, so I turned it off before I got to the end. It was kind of a nice looking movie, black and white. We see the little German town.

Part of a movie genre about military trials where the defense isn't supposed to win, usually for political reasons. In Breaker Morant and A Few Good Men, the defendants were war criminals and murderers but we were supposed to side with them because they were only following orders. In Paths of Glory and Conduct Unbecoming, the defendants were innocent. In The Winston Affair, the defendant was criminally insane.

In this movie, I guess we were supposed to side with the defendants because they shouldn't be hanged just for gang raping a schoolgirl. Oh, and Robert Blake was impotent, blubbed during the crime and Frank Sutton was mean to him.

It seemed to be intent on making the U.S. Army officers look good. You'd think Dalton Trumbo would have known better.

Woody Allen explains that he doesn't work in Hollywood

I never understood why they keep talking about Woody Allen and Hollywood. He doesn't work in Hollywood. His funding has come from European investors for years.

While promoting his new movie, "A Rainy Day in New York," Allen responded to a question about why his movie isn't being promoted in the United States and if he cares if he never works in Hollywood again. 

"I couldn't care less," he said to France24. "I've never worked in Hollywood, I always work in New York and it doesn't matter to me for a second." 

He added that if in the future no one financed his films, he would still write and create stories on his own.

But he was just talking about writing. He didn't mention financing his own movies. He has a net worth of $80 million and he could certainly afford it. His movies cost a lot by European standards but he could cut his costs down to two or three million which is more in line with what they spend over there.

There's not much to it, but you can read the whole article here. Click the France24 link above to watch a video of the interview.

The article goes on to quote a tweet by ex-convict and "global ambassador for Avon Products" Reese Witherspoon. Reese Witherspoon tweeted I'm with Natalie. I believe you, Dylan. Like Reese Witherspoon knows anything about it.

This was after Natalie Portman made a statement attacking Allen. She knew nothing about him, apparently, and thought he worked in Hollywood and that movie studios were bankrolling his movies. "They're movies, ain't they?"

And to think I defended Reese Witherspoon when she was arrested. Reese Witherspoon was charged with disorderly conduct for stomping around shouting "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!" while police arrested her "husband" for drunk driving.

Darn your socks!

It's not really cinema-related, but I saw a video on how to to darn socks. I guess I should start doing it. I feel like a jerk buying new socks instead of repairing my old ones.

In Berlin, at the end of World War Two, the Soviets found a dead German they thought might be Hitler. He looked kind of like him. But he was wearing darned socks and they figured Hitler would get new socks rather than repairing his old ones. I don't want to be like Hitler.

I don't want to be like that dead guy who looked like Hitler, either, now that I think about it.

Finn Wolfhard

The kid is sixteen. There's nothing to give him scale in the picture, but the internet says he's five ten. He looks taller here in the worst outfit imaginable.

His fans all seem to be adults. Perhaps this unnerved him and he's trying to convince them he's not as adorable as they thought. It could be that he makes all the money in his family and none of the adults can tell him anything. He'll dress the way he wants and no one can do anything about it.

Town Without Pity (1961)

I haven't watched it yet. But it's a rape movie.

In 1960, four American servicemen stationed in Germany rape a high school girl.

You know how, in Judgement at Nuremberg, Werner Klemperer (Hogan's Hero's Colenol Klink) played a Nazi war criminal? In this movie, one of the rapists is played by Frank Sutton who went on to play Sergeant Carter on Gomer Pyle, USMC.

Kirk Douglas plays their defense attorney. Four years earlier, he did the same thing in Kubrick's Paths of Glory. And E.G. Marshall played the prosecutor, like he was in Compulsion two years earlier.

I don't know if these things had anything to do with the casting.

Look at the progression of Jodie Foster's early career. First, she played Eddie's Peppermint Patty-like friend in The Courtship of Eddie's Father. Then (two years later) she played essentially the same character in Martin Scorcese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore which must be what led to her playing the child prostitute Iris in Scorcese's next movie, Taxi Driver. You don't think The Courtship Eddie's Father launched her on the path to success? It's a shame her brother, Buddy, didn't play a more distinctive character in Mayberry RFD.

I had watched the very beginning of Town Without Pity. The Army wants to smooth things over with the German town the military base is located near by getting the rapists sentenced to death. Death sentences for anything short of murder is a terrible idea. In this case, it would just give rapists a compelling reason to murder their victims since they're likely to be executed anyway and it would make them less likely to be caught.

Clarence Darrow, writing about the Leopold & Loeb case (you can see in Compulsion), noted that Illinois had made kidnapping punishable by death and the result was that every person kidnapped in the state during those years was murdered.

Look at The Onion Field. Two petty criminals somehow manage to take a couple of cops hostage. Thinking they'll be executed under the Lindbergh Law anyway, they murder one cop--the other gets away.

In the 1700's, Samuel Johnson suggested that Britain could save lives by ending the death penalty for highway robbery.

Marathon Man (1976)

There are super powers we might realistically develop. Like being able to run faster or longer distances than most people.

Look at the old movie Get Carter. Michael Caine plays a cockney gangster who, besides being a complete psychopath, can run really fast. And the cops don't have guns there so they couldn't shoot him in the leg.

In Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman doesn't quite weaponize jogging, but he makes good use if it.

I just watched the opening of the movie, the road rage incident involving elderly New Yorkers. An elderly Jewish guy in an Impala was the aggressor against a pitiful old German in a Mercedes, two old men, each in an old car they could barely keep running. It was an interesting sequence. It may have been an homage to two other Roy Scheider movies, The French Connection and its sequel, The Seven Ups. Roy was driving in The Seven Ups. In this movie, bystanders were bewildered rather than afraid for their safety. The drivers got to shout abuse at each other.

I'm perfectly fine with a Nazi burning to death, of course. The Jewish guy who murdered him didn't really know he was a Nazi, so it was just as well that he was killed, too.

Dustin Hoffman plays a 40-year-old college student. He has a butt shot.

With Lawrence Olivier on his last legs playing a Nazi war criminal. This was the first movie I ever saw him in as far as I know.

I saw a profile of Olivier back then on 60 Minutes which characterized this as one of a number of movies he was in at the end that weren't very good. Olivier knew he wasn't long for this world and needed to make money to leave to his family. But I thought this movie was pretty good. I don't know what Morley Safer had against it.

I also remember someone saying they saw a kid standing out in the lobby during the movie. His parents sent him out during the torture scene.

Big Fan (2009)

I watched Big Fan again after my recent post about The Fanatic.

Paul (Patton Oswalt) works as a night attendant in a parking garage. Which doesn't seem that bad as terrible jobs go. He has a cramped bedroom in his mother's house. He has one close friend, which is actually pretty good for an adult. His car seems okay. He has no qualms taking a long drive through a terrible neighborhood in the middle of the night. He sits in his booth writing out what he's going to say when he phones a sports call-in show at one or two in the morning. He's a major figure among regular callers. This, perhaps, helps him to maintain a feeling of superiority over his infinitely more successful lawyer brother.

He and his only friend dress up as sports fans and go to football games. They hang around in the parking lot where all the other sports fans gather. He tries to catch a football someone has thrown, not to him. He and his friend can't afford tickets, so they sit in the parking lot and watch the game on TV they've somehow plugged into the car battery.

The life this poor devil has made for himself comes crashing down around him when he wakes up in the hospital after being brutally beaten by his favorite football player. His family thinks he's an idiot for not suing and his brother finds a way to file a lawsuit for an absurd amount without his knowledge or consent.

Being brutally assaulted by a millionaire in high-priced strip club should have been Paul's salvation. If nothing else, it should have been an escape from the living death of sports fandom. Was his three-day coma a reference to Christ's resurrection? The movie has a certain amount of religious imagery. He drives around with a rosary hanging from his rearview mirror.

I could see why it would be embarrassing to sue, to go into court and explain on the stand that they were stalking a guy, then stupidly TOLD him they'd been following him even though they witnessed him buying drugs. Paul thought he was the guy's "#1 fan", and he probably saw himself as a minor celebrity always calling the radio show. Would he give all that up for a few million dollars?