Scattered thoughts, Jojo Rabbit (which I haven't seen)

A while back, we had my Republican aunt and uncle visit. Someone asked how they felt about Trump being elected. I didn't know if they even voted for him, but I would have been happy to let them enjoy this triumph that came out of nowhere. No one thought he had a chance.

But my aunt started talking about "brown people". They live in an affluent suburb of Seattle which is now favored by South Asians coming there to work for Microsoft. Whites are now less than 50% of the population. According to Wikipedia, this is unnerving to some older white residents.

I didn't know this at the time. I googled it later.

If I had known, I would have told them to try some of the Indian restaurants. Tandouri Chicken has replaced Fish & Chips as the most popular take-out item in England and it will be just as popular here (poor chickens).

And I would have reminded them that India was the only country in the world where a majority of people surveyed wanted George W Bush to be re-elected.

In this very blog I said something to the effect that, after all the MSNBC I've been forced to sit through, it would be refreshing to see a Trump supporter in a movie or on TV and to present this as neutral infomation, without supporting or condemning them and without explanation as to what was wrong with them.

I said that while writing about a French TV miniseries about some horrible racist children. I haven't seen it, but, reportedly, in the sequel, they're in their 20's and have become full blown fascists.

I wrote on this blog about a middle schooler in Alabama who was paddled for writing Trump's name on the white board. It was against the rules at the school to utter the name of the President of the United States except in history class. So at least one Trump supporter was cruelly persecuted, although the idiots who spanked him were probably Trump supporters, too.

So, uh, what was I talking about?

Oh, yes, I was going to say something about Jojo Rabbit, a movie I haven't seen. I'll probably try to watch it of I can see it for free somewhere. It's about a kid in the Third Reich who has Hitler for an imaginary friend. All this stuff seemed vaguely related when I started writing, but now I don't know what the hell I was thinking.

It's hard to believe children saw Hitler this way.

There was the old TV mini-series The Holocaust. Michael Moriarty joins the SS. His wife and children enthuse over him when he puts on his horrible black uniform with the skull insignia. You really think they couldn't see he was evil?

Thomas Kinkade, Kincade fire

I was reading an article by film critic A.S. Hamrah about the life and work of artist Thomas Kinkade. He would paint pictures of quaint cottages in the woods.

Hamrah noted that the bright yellow-orange light coming from every window made the houses all look like they were on fire.

So, by coincidence, I come across news of a Kincade fire in California. The name is spelled different, but I it jumped out at me. And it had this photo:

If the other colors had been sickly pastels and if you couldn't see actual flames and bellowing smoke, it would look a little like a Thomas Kinkade painting.

Kinkade mass produced so many paintings and copies of his paintings that they're worth very little now. I saw some poor devil on line who had paid six thousand dollars each for three of his paintings. Now he finds they're worth three or four hundred each.

Kinkade was under investigation by the FBI for manipulating stock prices when he died mixing Valium and alcohol. His corporation was publicly traded, but he wanted it back, so he started selling his work directly to the public at low prices undercutting his "galleries" (franchises) which people paid in some cases $180,000 to open. He was putting them out of business causing his stock prices to drop so he could buy up shares cheaply. He made a fortune but was in his 50's when alcoholism killed him.

Doris Wishman

The story of Doris Wishman seems cute when you read about her. She had thirty-one directing credits. She never learned to record live sound and she didn't want to go through the trouble of lip sych dubbing, so she would do everything she could to avoid showing the person speaking. The camera would drift around, film stuff around the room. It actually worked pretty well.

But she was such a seedy character, making nudie and sexploitation films, "roughies" and, eventually, actual porn.

I may be over-extrapolating, but she seemed to come from kind of a degenerate family.  She worked for her cousin Max Rosenberg who distributed exploitation films. Wishman took up movie making herself to help cope with the death of her husband who died of a heart attack at age 31. She borrowed $10 thousand ($88 thousand today) from her sister to do this.

Some of her movies were worse than others. I thought Bad Girls Go To Hell had some nice touches, like when young woman meets the alcoholic. They tend to have twist endings even when it doesn't make sense.

I read an interview with her late in life. She was making a porno film. The interviewer asked her what she would do with it when it was done. She said she'd take it to a distributor, that she had worked in distribution so knowing where to take them was her strong point.

With that in mind, I suggested a film student I knew go into distribution. I assumed that making the movie itself was the easy part so focus on making connections with people who can help you make your money back. That's where filmmakers always get ripped off. If it got her terrible movies into distribution it seems like the way to go.

Frownland (2007)

I didn't want to watch it because it was by a collaborator with the Safdie brothers, but it was supposed to be terribly controversial. About an unlikable person in New York. He has a bad roommate and a friend who is suicidal. Filmed with a handheld camera. According to the description on The Criterion Channel, film festival crowds got into violent arguments over it. The only thing to argue about is whether it's a waste of time or how much of a waste of time it is.

The Safdie boys are Zionists. Their uncle is an Israeli architect who, last I heard, was working on the destruction of a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem.

A mix of naturalism and overacting. Filmed in 16mm. It reportedly took six years to make.

In six years he couldn't have come up with a better title? It's not even his---he took it from a song.

Hey! I was right!

Only picture I could find from the movie that wasn't awful.

The Criterion Channel is showing how open-minded they are by making several gore movies by Herschell Gordon Lewis available.

For some reason, I liked Lewis's movies better than Ed Wood's even though Ed Wood put some effort into it. Lewis's earlier movies were just an excuse for series of nude scenes. His later movies were an excuse for a series of gore scenes. And, this apparently works pretty well if you have no talent or ability.

But I just watched most of The Gore Gore Girls (1972). He put some effort into this one and it was terrible. It was more repulsive, but he also put some effort into the plot and characters and he was just no good at it.

You know how you watch a zero budget movie, and you think that if the people who made it just had some money to work with they could probably make a pretty good movie? I never got that feeling from Herschell Gordon Lewis. The Gore Gore Girls proved he couldn't do it.

Brigham City (2001)

"Never trust a man with a neatly trimmed mustache." --Charles Bukowski

You know all those movies, like Footloose and Inherit the Wind, where small towns have only one church which exerts a totalitarian control over the community?

Then there was the Andy Griffith Show. Griffith was always pretty good at playing evil characters and this comes out in certain episodes of the show. He threw a woman in jail when she pointed out the obvious problem with him serving as both the cop who gave her a ticket and the traffic court judge when she tries to challenge it. He confiscates private property without legal basis, he chases people out of town who have every right to be there. He "protects" the people of Mayberry from things they want and have every right to have.

In this movie Brigham City (2001), the Mormon sheriff is also Bishop of the church. He decides that there's no reason for the people of the town to know there's been a sex murder so he keeps it secret from them. It turns out to the work of a serial killer. At one point, he sends Mormons out to search every house in town. An old women points out that they have no warrant and that they're not even police and refuses to let them in, so the sheriff pounds on her door and threatens to break it down. The woman's adult son lets them in and they physically attack him when he won't unlock the closet where he has a collection of dirty movies. They take him in for questioning.

When I looked it up online, I was surprised that this was intended to be pro-Mormon. Mormons were excited about the dawn of LDS cinema.

The writer/director/star Richard Dutcher is known as the Father/Godfather of Mormon Cinema. There's been regional cinema in Utah for years, most of it showing Mormon tendencies, but this is a bit different.

It's nice that he found a niche audience. He did quit Mormonism later.

Felicity Huffman free

"America's Mom" Felicity Huffman has walked out of prison a new woman after serving 11 days of a cruel fourteen day sentence.

She maintained her dignity, not blubbing in court like Anthony Weiner, Paris Hilton or Robert Downy, Jr.

I finally looked at her filmography. I don't remember her, but Reversal of Fortune is the only thing she was in that I've seen.

A couple of restaurant things

I went out to eat. The waitress kept addressing us as "love". It's only young ones who do that, but they usually call you "hon".

And when did they start asking "How is everything tasting?"

Did I ever tell about the time I found a dime in my food? I was eating a calzone and there was a dime in it. I showed the waiter. He didn't know what to say. You'd think I'd get a free meal out of it, but he didn't offer and I didn't ask.

And speaking of that, don't forget to tip when you get a free meal. Hillary Clinton has failed to do that twice that the public knows about.

But it's hard to calculate a tip under those circumstances. I knew someone who was in a hotel in China. The toilet got clogged so he called the front desk. They misunderstood and sent up a prostitute. He told her the problem and she got on the phone to the front desk and translated.

"I hope you tipped her," I said.

He didn't. But how do you know what to tip when you don't know what she charges? Giving five bucks to a high priced call girl could be insulting.

Uh oh.

Remember how the DNC was trying to get the press to take Trump seriously in hopes that he would get the Republican nomination? Trump easily defeated his Republican opponents, but Clinton supporters still thought beating him would be a breeze. This was revealed by Wikileaks.

And now, I just did a news search for Clinton and found three or four links to people on Fox News urging Hillary Clinton to enter the race.

Long ago, during the Watergate hearings, I started seeing a bumpersticker that said Don't blame me, I voted for McGovern. People kept telling George McGovern himself that they would vote for him if they could do it all over again.

But even now,  I don't think anybody is sorry they didn't vote for Hillary Clinton.

For some time, I've had occasion to tell the "amusing" anecdote about the time I was rejected for a job as pizza delivery driver. The guy they hired instead of me later forced the owner to open the safe at gunpoint before hitting him over the head. I had started telling this as a self-deprecating story, how an employer preferred even a dangerous psychopath to me, but, telling it over the years, it became one of personal triumph, how a restauranteur cruelly rejected me and lived to regret it.

That may be what Hillary Clinton is after. If she loses, she won't be the idiot who inflicted another four years of Donald Trump on the world---she'll be the victim, and Donald Trump will give us all what we deserve for not electing her president.

Hillary & Chelsea Clinton on tour

I just watched video of a local news report in San Francisco about millionaires Hillary and Chelsea Clinton speaking to an audience on their book tour. They claim to have written a book called Gutsy Women. One of the gutsy women they discuss in the book is Nancy Drew.

In the clip, Chelsea Clinton talked about how Hillary Clinton writes in longhand. It wasn't cute or funny, but I suspect she had her reasons for droning on about it. I was reminded of this from Jeffrey St Clair's review of Hillary Clinton's last book, What Happened:

So someone has ghost-written another Hillary Clinton memoir. My biggest question when I picked it up was: Did Hillary stiff the writer out of the final payment as she did Barbara Feinman, the real author of It Takes a Village?

 Chelsea was trying to convince us that they actually wrote the book.

Hillary kicked off the tour by smearing Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein, calling them "Russian assets". Which confirms what St Clair went on to write in his review:

Of course, Hillary Clinton has never been able to conceal her contempt for her enemies, real and imagined. It’s one reason she’s never been a successful politician. Where others are supple, she is taut. Hillary is a prolific liar, but, unlike Bill, she is graceless and transparent as she spins her tall tales. She is also probably the nastiest political figure in America since Nixon. Yet she lacked Nixon’s Machiavellian genius for political manipulation. Hillary wears her menace on her face. She could never hide her aspiration for power; her desire to become a war criminal in the ranks of her mentor Henry Kissinger (symbolized by the laurels of a Nobel Peace Prize, naturally). Americans don’t mind politicians with a lust to spill blood, but they prefer them not to advertise it.

 

MCU as theme park

I have this second cousin once removed. When she finished college, her grandmother's graduation present was to pay for her to take a trip anywhere she wanted in the world. She chose Disneyland.

That family goes there every couple of years. It seems idiotic.

But then, I once had to fly to Las Vegas for a trade show. It was the only time I've been there.

I was sitting in the airport. I kept staring at a family waiting for the flight. There was something about them that didn't look right but I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

It turned out they were French. There was also a German family. The father wore little glasses. Made him look like a German intellectual. I knew they were Germans because the children were watching a German dubbed Disney movie about a princess. And there was a family from East Asia.

All going to Las Vegas.

I felt ashamed to be an American, but I also realized that these people were no smarter than we are. All the places they could have gone and they picked Las Vegas.

Maybe Americans should take advantage of these things. Look at the stupid crap in our country through the eyes of outsiders.

When I started writing this, I was going to say that maybe the Marvel Comic Universe as theme park is a good thing if it saves us from having to go to actual theme parks. But maybe we should get out more.

Felicity Huffman behind bars

She still has a spring in her step, thank goodness.

Best of luck to Felicity Huffman now in prison for tricking a privately owned money-grubbing institution into taking large amounts of her money.

She's only there for a couple of weeks.

I mentioned this before in another context---a lot of people get on Twitter because they think they'll be able to interact with celebrities. Most are disappointed, of course. But prison inmates love pen pals. At least one woman has become friends with Phil Spector this way. You could start writing to Bill Cosby although his impaired vision might make this a problem.

I tried to find a list of imprisoned celebrities online but they're mostly athletes plus a few "reality" TV stars. There were also a couple of actors who committed horrible murders.

You might find yourself having to meet these people if they're ever released, so choose carefully who you write to.

Hillary Clinton is pro-Harvey Weinstein

"I'm so sorry. Good luck," Woody Allen said giving Harvey Weinstein the ol' brush off. Weinstein had called Allen for help stopping Ronan Farrow from exposing Weinstein's sex crimes.

I don't know what Ronan Farrow says about that since he hates his father like an idiot.

Weinstein should have called Mia Farrow. He could have offered to revive her career if Ronan would lay off. Mia's been washed up since she broke up with Woody Allen.

But now Ronan is also attacking Hillary Clinton.

Farrow recalled that he was due to interview former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for his last book, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (published in 2018), when word got around political circles that he was working on a story about Harvey Weinstein.

"There was an apparent effort to cancel that interview after they raised concerns about the reporting on Weinstein," Farrow said.

Weinstein was a powerful ally of Clinton's and had helped bundle and raise millions of Hollywood dollars for her.

"It was a personal moment of gut punch to me," Farrow said. "People that I thought would support that kind of reporting were actually very leery of it."

It could be a weird psychological thing, that he's displacing his repressed hatred for his mother onto Hillary Clinton.

Francis Ford Coppola sides with Scorsese

“When Martin Scorsese says that the Marvel pictures are not cinema, he’s right, because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration,” Francis Ford Coppola told a journalist in Lyon, France. “I don’t know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again. Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.”

Coppola is eighty. He was in Lyon to to receive the Prix Lumiere for contributions to cinema.

I haven't been to Disneyland in over thirty years. I can't remember what I was doing there. But they had this ride where you sat in seats that would start pitching around as you watched a Star Wars film so it was like you were riding around in some sort of space shuttle. It would be perfectly reasonable to deny that was cinema and call it an amusement park ride, and I don't see why you couldn't put some theatrical movies into the same category as Martin Scorsese did.

The main thing I remember at Disneyland was this teenage couple we kept crossing paths with. The boy was significantly shorter than the girl and they kept making out, so he would have to stand on his toes and extend his lips as far as he could to kiss her. They'd be about fifty now.

I hope to heck he goes deaf

I just went outside and yelled at a big stupid-looking ape. He apparently can't drive his Suburban without the windows open and his "music" with his subwoofers going. I've seen him drive by and assumed he was a university student but getting a better look at him, he may be a construction worker building something at the university. Either way, the UO attracts nothing but vermin. I can hear it in my house every time he drives through the neighborhood.

"I'll try to turn it down," he said, but demanded that I tell people who had parties that, too.

So he does this to get even with people for having parties?

I'll be so disappointed if these morons don't suffer massive hearing loss.

The Two Popes

I know nothing about it. All I saw was the trailer. It looks sort of lavish. It's about old people which might be refreshing, but it looks like it has an all-male cast. IMDb.com shows that it has two women, one who appears uncredited as a nameless journalist. There's a stunt coordinator and four stuntmen one of whom does "fire stunts". I can't imagine what they were needed for.

Might make a good double feature with We Have a Pope, aka Habemus Papam. They elect a new pope, but before the guy can step out on the balcony, he has a panic attack and runs screaming through the Vatican. The cardinals can't leave until the new Pope is presented to the world, so there are scenes of all these elderly virgins sitting alone in their rooms playing solitaire and doing jigsaw puzzles.

They elect the guy by a two-thirds majority, but once they vote him in, they act like he was chosen by God and they can't get rid of him even when it's clear they've made a terrible mistake.

Bill Macy, RIP

I mentioned him the other day in a post about Gemini Man. Bill Macy has died at age 97.

He was best known for playing Walter Findlay on Maude. I remember him in The Late Show with Art Carney and The Jerk with Steve Martin. Looking through his filmography, there are other things I'm sure I saw him in. The last thing I remember was an episode of Norm, Norm MacDonald's sit-com. Laurie Metcalf took Norm to see Bill Macy to help him learn not to fear death.

The Ely family

There's nothing more about the sad case of the Valerie Ely murdered by her son Cameron who was then killed by cops. Ron Ely is 81. He looks great.

Why did they put Cameron in a boarding school?

Rich people do this for some reason. Mia Farrow forced Moses to go to boarding school. Charles Schultz was having some minor difficulty with his daughter so he put her in a Swiss boarding school. They might seem like perfectly nice people but this is abnormal.

I knew a couple who had a teenage son. He developed a morbid fascination with the Navy. He spotted an ad in the back of a magazine for a Navy-oriented military school. He begged and cried and pleaded for them to send him. They kept explaining that the school was for wealthy delinquents but he wouldn't listen.

It's a shame he didn't go. He turned 18, joined the Navy, enlisted for four years, and realized after a week that he had made a terrible, terrible mistake. He could have spent a few weeks in military school and come home. Instead he found himself stuck in the Navy during a war.

Ron Ely's son killed after murdering mother

Ron and Valerie Ely

62-year-old Valerie Ely was stabbed to death by her son, 30-year-old Cameron Ely, who called 911 and tried to blame his 81-year-old father, actor Ron Ely, for the crime.

Ron Ely played Tarzan in the 1960's TV series. He starred in the movie Doc Savage in the 1970's and went on to host a TV game show. He hosted the Miss America pageant in the early 1980's.

6 foot 5 inch Cameron Ely was shot and killed by police. He had been a football player in his first year of college and had a degree in psychology from Harvard.

Ron and Valerie Ely also have two daughters, Kirsten and Kaitlin, 32, who are reportedly "social media influencers".

Cameron, in spite of graduating from Harvard, worked as a security guard. He graduated from a $50 thousand-a-year boarding school. His godfather was Fess Parker, TV's Daniel Boone.

No report on where Cameron's life went wrong, why a Harvard graduate was working as a security guard.

That's all I know about it.


Tarzan went off the air in 1968 when I was five. I remember watching it. I never followed it. I would watch for a few minutes then wander off. In the '70's, we had HBO for a time and I watched Doc Savage a few times. I didn't know until years later that Paul Wexler who played the villain had once owned the house right across the street from us and had sexually harassed my mother in the 1950's. Wexler died in 1979.

For a couple of years when I was eight or nine, I was a fan of Daniel Boone starring Cameron Ely's godfather, the late Fess Parker. I dreamed of owning a musket. I never gave any thought to wearing one of those grotesque 'coon skin caps.

Jobe'z World

When I watch zero-budget or "micro budget" movies made in New York City, I've looked them up online and most of them they say that none of the actors were paid. But the actors are quite good and I look them up on imdb.com and they have a lot of other credits---they're all professionals.

Which means that if you're going to make a movie without any money, you might be well advised to make it in New York, although I don't know that they'll work on just anything. They have a glut of actors, but I'm sure they have a glut of directors, too. And then there are union issues.

If you're an actor, you can't even work for free in New York without competing with experienced professionals.

If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere, so why not make it somewhere that you'd actually want to live?

I'm sitting here with Jobe'z World on. A micro budget comedy about a middle-aged roller blading drug dealer whose celebrity customer dies of an overdose.

Free with Amazon Prime.


Did I say something on here about being open to casting seemingly inappropriate actors? I guess I didn't but I was thinking about it.

The '70's private eye show, Cannon, had a dangerously overweight private eye. I watched it when I was a kid and watched some old episodes again recently I was surprised to realize it was an action show. Cannon beats people up, karate chops them, uses Jiu Jitsu. Sometimes he just uses his weight against them. They should have been more sensitive to the actor's feeling. They'd play tuba music as he walks around.

And there were the shows Perry Mason and Law & Order which had actors in their 70's playing police officers. I've seen movies with guys in their 30's playing detectives, and the guys in their 70's are somehow more plausible.

I mentioned not long ago a husky 12-year-old who played a jungle boy in a loincloth.

In this movie, Jobe'z World, they have a middle-aged man playing a character who I would have expected to be younger. That may have been the point. I don't know what age group roller blades anymore.

Kardashians in decline

Kardashians pretending to cry.

From Showbiz 411:

But two weeks ago, the Ks dropped below a million to 983,000. And then this past Sunday they fell again, to 862,000. So that’s a drop of 19.6% in a month. 

This is despite Kim getting people out of jail, and Kanye having his usual bipolar situations. Viewers are losing interest fast, which isn’t a total surprise. Who could still be following these people? ... 

Now we’ll wait and see if next Sunday has another drop. Then we’ll know the party is over.

It's like the time I got off Facebook. I was so happy. I was disappointed that I couldn't post on Facebook about it. When their show is cancelled, the ghastly Kardashian "family" will likely disintegrate but we won't be able to enjoy it because they won't have a show anymore.

Years ago, I would watch it now and then on Sunday mornings when there was nothing else on. That was on a 19" analog TV at a distance of about ten feet. I later watched a few minutes of them in high definition and was shocked at how awful they looked.

There was a post on this blog long ago about the time Kim Kardashian had her buttocks x-rayed to prove she didn't have implants. One of her sisters had her breasts x-rayed at the time so they could see what implant looked like in x-rays. So these two stupid women exposed themselves to radiation for no medical purpose. That entry has gotten tens of thousands of hits.

We need new strategies

This has been the Democratic Party's strategy for years. They figure that, as long as their candidate is every so slightly to the left of the Republican, all the leftists will have no choice but to vote for them. You'd think Hillary Clinton would be an end of that strategy, but now it's Biden. There's not a single issue on which Biden is more progressive than Clinton and he's dumber than less likable than she is. But, once again, they think Trump is so repellent that we'll have no choice but to vote Democrat.

Now the DNC thinks that voters will carefully calculate whether Biden or Trump is more corrupt and become enthusiastic Biden supporters.

We're all doomed!

Oh well. This is movie-related. You may as well go to film school. The economy is terrible. At times like this, you can either become a nurse or pick some other recession-proof or depression-proof career which even then won't protect you from catastrophic climate change, or you can do whatever you want and rest assured that, no matter how badly you fail, you're not going to miss out on the booming economy.

If you want to succeed in an extremely competitive industry, you generally have to be extremely talented and highly driven.

What we have to do now is figure out a path to success for people who are either highly talented but not driven or highly driven but not talented. Or people who aren't driven or talented who just have some vague thought that making movies might be a good idea.

Give that some thought.

Hunter Biden

Hunter Biden has resigned from the board of a "Chinese-backed" private equity firm. He promised not to work for any other foreign companies if his father is elected president.

If his father isn't elected, why would a foreign company want him?

Lunch Bucket Joe

Will Smith, Gemini Man

De-aged Will Smith. They could have just put a wig on him and filmed him with a soft focus lens.

They digitally de-aged Will Smith in this thing so he could play his own 25-year-old clone. Will Smith plays a sniper who murders people for the government and his clone is given the task of killing him.

It's a shame Jaden Smith doesn't look more like Dad. Jaden playing the clone could have been a nice father-son project. Might help them work out any Oedipal conflicts since they'd be trying to murder each other. It could have been the triumph they hoped After Earth would be.

Robert Walker and Robert Walker, Jr, looked enough alike that they could gave played roles like this, although poor Robert Walker died at 32. Maybe Alan Hale and Alan Hale, Jr.

Identical twins often don't look THAT identical, so a clone shouldn't look precisely like his...what do you call the person you're a clone of?

Variety pointed out that they've been trying to make this movie for twenty-two years. Only now has digital technology reached the point where it was possible. Which means that "had the filmmakers known how long it would take, they could have shot the clone scenes in 1997 and then cast the same actor to play the older character two decades later". They could have filmed young Will Smith bragging about his mint condition 22-year-old car.

Remember the episode of Maude where Walter was accused of being a flasher? In the end, police bring in the REAL flasher played by an actor who looks just like him.

Think of how happy an actor who looks like a young Will Smith would have been to play this role. It would probably be more interesting for the audience to watch.

I worked years ago in an alcoholism treatment center. One of the patients looked like Bob Newhart.

Why did it even need to be a clone? Is it plausible that anyone would bother making a clone of Will Smith? Couldn't it have been about Will Smith and his pissed-off son trying to kill each other? The same attributes that made Will Smith become a trained killer would have also have made him an exceptionally bad father.

Or maybe Will Smith could play a great father whose son is a murderous spoiled ingrate.

Who's worse, Ellen DeGeneres or Joseph Stalin?

George Bush, Jr, criticized Donald Trump. So now my family likes him. They even like his "art" now. I keep reminding them of the millions of people he killed.

You'll be happy to know that they've downgraded Joseph Stalin's death toll. According to a Yale university prof, he killed six million, but even that figure is inflated since they include people who died in the famine in the '30s. The famine was caused by weather conditions and by the medieval level of agriculture in the USSR at the time. There were famines in 1922, 1921, 1917, 1905. There were famines every decade. Stalin put an end to them by collectivizing farming, making farms large enough that they could become mechanized.

"I don't know how we were so far off," the professor said.

The claim that Stalin killed thirty million people was insane. The Soviet population was less than 130 million in the 1926 census and there were over thirty million killed in World War Two. This would mean that nearly half the country's population was killed and nobody noticed until sixty years later, and then they only found out through demographic analysis, giving everything the worst possible interpretation.

So. Stalin, over a period of 25 years, killed "only" two million people. George Bush managed more than that in just eight years.

I don't think there's been any U.S. president in the last sixty years who's killed fewer than a million people, except maybe Gerald Ford if you don't include him in the crimes of the Nixon regime.

So I was heartened to see the backlash against Ellen DeGeneres for tweeting her declaration of friendship with George Bush. Of course, some of it was because he was against same sex marriage and not because he  killed millions.

Here's a Kim Kardashian thing I'll want to see

Remember when Kim Kardashian got tied up and robbed in a hotel room? They're going to make a movie loosely based on it in France, directed by Joann Sfar (who is a man, by the way). Sounds like it's from the POV of the robbers.

Kim Kardashian sued Old Navy for having a woman in a commercial who looked somewhat like her but could dance and move around freely. Kardashian thinks that no one who resembles her should ever have a job. That's who they should hire to play her, but they're going for an actress who can capture the essence of Kim Kardashian even if she doesn't look like her.

Crimes like this don't bother me especially. As long as they limit themselves to hotel invasion robberies involving millions of dollars in jewelry, the violent armed criminals are of little threat to most of us (although they did hold a security guard at gunpoint), and it was only Kim Kardashian.

Ronan Farrow: Right about Natalie Portman?

Natalie Portman emoting.

Something else was in Ronan Farrow's book---repeated attacks on the movie Jackie, the script to which was written by NBC News president Noah Oppenheim.

Ronan suggests that Oppenheim blocked him from exposing Harvey Weinstein's crimes because it would hurt his budding career as screenwriter. Jackie starred Natalie Portman as JFK's widow.

According to someone called Hunter Harris on Vulture:

Some people...believe that Jackie is an impressive work of art. Other people — apparently, David Remnick, Mia Farrow, Ronan Farrow, and also my best friend Molly — do not feel this way. Observe these excerpts from Catch and Kill, where Ronan Farrow refers to Jackie as a “morose biopic” that “featured a lot of dialogue-free long shots of the woman in question pacing around with tear-streaked mascara.” Objectively, these observations are correct. Subjectively, however, this is what makes Jackie great.

This reference to Natalie Portman's dialog-free sequences reminded me of Dana Stevens' comments about Portman on Slate:

I've never believed her in a single role. She evokes no emotional response in me beyond, "Oh, there's Natalie Portman." She doesn't overact or underact; she just stands around with whatever the appropriate expression for the scene seems to be on her sweet, pretty, childlike face. If there's something going on behind that face, I neither know nor care what it is, which means that long stretches of Brothers involving her character's interiority struck me as dramatically inert. If you possess the gene that enables Portman-caring, you may find them brilliant. [emphasis added]

Someone pointed out that Ronan Farrow had a few other reasons to be mad at NBC News. He had a show on MSNBC. His Mom kept tweeting about it. It was abruptly canceled.

After that, people spotted Farrow on another NBC News show. The show had the anchors sitting with the newsroom as a background and you could see Ronan Farrow sitting at his desk all day presumably playing computer solitaire. After a while, he got up to go to the bathroom. He had been made an object of both pity and ridicule.

Ronan Farrow accuses Matt Lauer of rape

Ronan Farrow

So, in Ronan Farrow's new book, there's a rape accusation against Matt Lauer. They already reported  something about his conduct during the Sochi Olympics.

Variety reports:

In Sochi, Nevils was tasked with working with former “Today” co-anchor Meredith Vieira, who’d been brought back to the show to do Olympics coverage. In Nevils’ account, one night over drinks with Vieira at the hotel bar where the NBC News team was staying, they ran into Lauer, who joined them. At the end of the night, Nevils, who’d had six shots of vodka, ended up going to Lauer’s hotel room twice — once to retrieve her press credential, which Lauer had taken as a joke, and the second time because he invited her back. Nevils, Farrow writes, “had no reason to suspect Lauer would be anything but friendly based on prior experience.”

Once she was in his hotel room, Nevils alleges, Lauer — who was wearing a T-shirt and boxers — pushed her against the door and kissed her. He then pushed her onto the bed, “flipping her over, asking if she liked anal sex,” Farrow writes. “She said that she declined several times.”

According to Nevils, she “was in the midst of telling him she wasn’t interested again when he ‘just did it,’” Farrow writes. “Lauer, she said, didn’t use lubricant. The encounter was excruciatingly painful. ‘It hurt so bad. I remember thinking, Is this normal?’ She told me she stopped saying no, but wept silently into a pillow.” Lauer then asked her if she liked it. She tells him yes. She claims that “she bled for days,” Farrow writes.

Lauer has put out an open letter denying it.

I don't like Ronan Farrow. He defended his attacks against Woody Allen by saying that there was no evidence against Harvey Weinstein, either. Although there were dozens of victims in Weinstein's case.

Farrow said the same thing in the case of Brett Kavanaugh---Farrow found another Kavanaugh victim whose story seemed less plausible than others. Even MSNBC expressed doubt. There was danger that weak accusations would dilute the case against Kavanaugh, but Farrow said the same thing---there was no evidence against Weinstein, either.

That seems to be Farrow's standard of evidence except in the cases of his brother and sister, Moses Farrow and Soon-yi Previn, talking about childhood abuse they suffered at the hands of Mia Farrow. They need PROOF.

I don't know how the book will affect his future employment. You know how, in job interviews, you're not supposed to attack your previous employer? Farrow attacks NBC News for not running his anti-Weinstein story.

The book paints NBC News executives as obstructive in his Weinstein investigation. As Farrow amassed his reporting about Weinstein, Oppenheim asked him, “Like, is this really worth it?” and suggested no one knows who Weinstein is. Farrow was eventually told to stop reporting the story, because it was under review at NBC Universal. “This is a Steve Burke decision. It’s an Andy decision,” Farrow recalls Richard Greenberg, the head of NBC News’ investigative unit, telling him. Since he didn’t believe NBC would ever run his story, he took it to the New Yorker, where it was published in October 2017.

Sources at NBC News say they haven’t read the book yet, but they plan to defend the company’s decisions against Farrow’s claims.

In anticipation of the publication of “Catch and Kill,” Oppenheim told Variety earlier this month: “We are more confident now than ever in the decisions we made around Ronan’s reporting.”

NBC News has been bracing for what was expected to be a damning portrayal of the news organization and its leadership. Based on the fact-checking process for the book, NBC News is bracing for a blistering portrait of the news division and its leadership. The company is prepared to present its rebuttal to claims that may be in the book. Farrow “is entitled to disagree with the decisions we made but he’s not entitled to his own set of facts,” Oppenheim told Variety.

Herschell Gordon Lewis is the one they take seriously?

I wonder how she got all that corn syrup out of her hair.

The Criterion Channel has two gore "films" of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Blood Feast and Color Me Blood Red.

Lewis had made nudie and sex movies in the '50's. In the '60's, Hollywood was moving in on that territory and they had to do something different. They had to think of something that people would pay to see that was in such bad taste that Hollywood wouldn't do it. So they settled on gore. He made a number of movies that were just an excuse for a series of bloody gore scenes.

Now, my theory, which I've stated elsewhere on this blog, was that if you made a movie that was simply an excuse for a series of nude scenes or a series of gore scenes, your movie would probably come out pretty good. It's the Taoist concept of Wu Wei---passive achievement, or "not trying". Lewis wasn't out to do anything but make money.

Ed Wood made movies that were personal or had something to say about the threat of nuclear annihilation. And there was Phil Tucker's Robot Monster, a film about genocide. How many Roger Corman movies dealt with the subject of nuclear war? For years, the US had an extremely high death rate from cancer and it was largely due to nuclear testing and they were the only ones in Hollywood who thought this was bad.

Plan 9 From Outer Space was nicely edited. HG Lewis filmed in master shots and lit his movies like a Brady Bunch episode.

Cinema is truly the art of the artless.

I saw online that these idiot comic book fans have their superhero panties in a bunch because Martin Scorsese said he tried to watch comic book movies but he didn't consider them cinema. They're actually enraged that a 76-year-old intellectual doesn't read comic books or watch movies based on them. And they're thrilled that Michael Moore praised the new Joker movie.

Moore said somewhere:

“I loved this film’s multiple homages to ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Network,’ ‘The French Connection,’ ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ How long has it been since we’ve seen a movie aspire to the level of Stanley Kubrick?”

Is he saying Stanley Kubrick films were full of homages to other movies? Is that the best we can hope for now?

Rip Taylor, RIP

I'll tell you the one joke I remember from Rip Taylor. I might have heard it on The Tomorrow Show. I don't remember, but it was in the late '70's. He would read jokes from a stack of cards as he did his act. He said:

A friend said he was going to get a hair transplant. I saw him a week later and he had a heart on his head.

I made a point of remembering it at the time, but that was a much earlier stage of life, and I may have missed something.

Rip Taylor died today at age 84.

Diahann Carroll, RIP

I remember watching Julia, a sit-com, 1968 to '71, about an African-American Vietnam War widow nurse and her son. I was about five. It was the golden age of homely child actors and I remember her son on the show having this friend who seemed homely to me at the time, but I just did an image search for him and he was cute, at least by today's standards. My mother seemed to like the show but I don't remember seeing it past the first season. It wasn't the first sit-com with a Black female lead, but it was the most respectable one.

Looking at Diahann Carroll's filmography on IMDb, I don't remember her but I'm sure I saw her in Roots: The Next Generation and a docudrama called Death Scream about a murder in New York.

She died  yesterday at 84.

The trouble with spaghetti westerns

I'm watching a 1950's Spanish movie set in a small town. Why did they build western town sets for spaghetti westerns? They could have used existing Spanish towns and it would have given them a more interesting look. This movie was made some years before the Italian westerns, but I'd say they could use the townspeople as extras and just have them wear their regular clothes. The trouble with European westerns is they didn't look European enough.

Darkest Africa, 1936

I remember the first time I saw Darkest Africa. It was an old serial from the 1930s starring lion tamer Clyde Beatty and introducing 12-year-old Manuel King, the world's youngest lion tamer, playing a jungle boy whose best friend was a man in an ape suit.

As I understand it, Manuel King's family owned a roadside attraction in the southwest featuring lions and tigers, and the kid would go in with a long pole and poke them with it until they escaped through a door. He was trained by a man who lost an arm in a lion taming mishap. The kid had no fear of lions which was not a good thing. They had to tell him not to hug them.



The first time I saw it---it was an edited down version called The Bat Men of Africa---I was stunned. It was on a local channel on TV. The jungle boy was an overweight kid in a furry loin cloth.

I told people about it, and someone suggested that being on the heavy side back then may have been seen as a sign of good health and athleticism.

If this was the case, they used the opposite reasoning with Clyde Beatty. He was shorter than everyone else but kept getting into fistfights.

I thought it was funny, but I've matured since then. Now I see a happy, normal  kid who got to be a movie star for a brief moment. His acting was fine. Every other episode, his character would be tossed into a pit full of lions and he would pick up a long stick and start poking them until they escaped out a side door. They wisely let him wear shoes, not like Johnny Weissmuller gingerly walking in bare feet. That partially mitigated their making a child do his own stunts.

There was a Cecil B. DeMille-like scene straight out of The Sign of the Cross where the kid was in a pit chained to a post. He writhed as lions were released to kill him. He quickly broke free and picked up a long stick that happened to be lying there.

The serial was predictably racist with Ray Turner playing a character called Hambone, the comic relief.

Manuel King died in 2016 at age 92.

George Kuchar's Society Slut, 1995

A society matron hates her ineffectual son and carries on an affair with a Toulouse-Lautrec-like artist. Filmed on analog video, the camera moved in close to compensate. Much of it filmed in front of a green screen.

It's brilliant!