Deluge, 1933

Pre-code, 1933. Within the first few minutes, warnings are sent out for ships to return to port and for planes to land at the nearest airport. A terrible, terrible storm is brewing. There's an unexpected solar eclipse. Soon, the west coast is destroyed and submerged. New Orleans is no more. And now the east coast is in for it.

We see an elaborate model of New York City destroyed in a massive flood and earthquake.

They didn't waste any time. All this happened quickly.

The disaster scenes were re-used in other movies, but the film was lost for decades until the 1980's when an Italian-dubbed print was discovered in an Italian film archive. Later, they found a copy with an English language soundtrack and they were able to restore it.

 

The rest of the movie was about the survivors. There's a woman swimmer in a daring two-piece swimsuit whose attempt to break a world record was cancelled because of the apocalypse. She is taken in by two men holed up in a cabin. When they start fighting over her, she escapes by swimming away.

A nice guy lawyer finds her washed up on shore and takes her to an abandoned cabin he moved into.  

A mob of unemployed workers come after them. They already raped and murdered a girl. The lawyer turns out to be pretty good at stabbing people. You'd think a woman of her athletic ability would have been of more help.

65 minutes. Available on Pub-D-Hub.

A bit of a cop out at the end. The lawyer had declared his swimmer girlfriend to be his common-law wife, then he finds out his original wife and children are still alive. So now what's he supposed to do?

All-white except for two or three Black characters presented in a deeply offensive way.

Kirk Cameron murders Christmas

I tried to celebrate Christmas by watching Kirk Cameron Saving Christmas again. I watched it once a few years ago and it was terrible. I tried but truly couldn't take it a second time.

I was inspired to attempt this hate viewing by Kirk Cameron holding large maskless Christmas caroling "protests". 

Cameron says he believes in "herd immunity", which means he WANTS as many people infected as possible. He's not doing it because he thinks God will protect them, he's doing it because he knows people will get the disease. And he knows there are no more hospital beds available there meaning more of those who catch it will die. And he knows that this may be his last chance for a super-spreader event now that vaccines are available.

Kirk Cameron is an anti-Christ. Look at the video of him smiling with genuine glee as he looks over the crowd picturing how many would die, and that was after making a horrible, horrible Christmas movie that could only make a mockery of what he pretends to be his religion.

Now they can get that reality show!

 

“This is like a new launch,” Richard Heene said. “I’m flying high.”

Balloon Boy's parents received a pardon from Colorado's governor for some reason.  

This won't be the new lease on life Heene imagines, but maybe it will be enough of a reminder of their crime that they can get a book deal out of it. Could lead to a Lifetime Channel movie.

'Twas the Night Before Christmas, Art Carney

 

The Painted Bird, the movie

 

Peter Debruge in Variety named The Painted Bird as one of the worst movies of the year. He walked out of it because he couldn't take the brutality. The book it was based on was a literary hoax so you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that it was fiction.

And there was something Salman Rushdie said on C-Span. He briefly mentioned a short story he read by a Chilean writer about a family that lives through a massive earthquake. The difference between comedy and tragedy is in the pacing. The story was only a couple of pages long but so many horrible things happening to the family were packed into it, it came across as funny.

I did this inadvertently. I wrote a heartfelt essay about looking through my junior high yearbook. I found it depressing because I knew about the horrible things that happened to the kids at my school. One boy's mother died after a long illness then his father committed suicide after her funeral. A boy who drowned himself in the river while fighting drug addiction, one who died of an overdose, one who was homeless and mentally ill and was finally committed to the state hospital after being ruled criminally insane. One whose alcoholic father battered him and his mother, a friendless kid who became more and more angry and would wander through the halls talking to himself, a kid who nobody liked who became a car thief like his older brother, but his brother got probation while he went to prison. 

The old people in the writing group thought it was hilarious.

If you could watch the movie in fast motion it might be easier to take.

Zontar, The Thing from Venus, Larry Buchanan, 1966

From A.S. Hamrah's recent review:

If, as Godard said, “the definition of the human condition should be in the mise en scène itself,” then Zontar, which plays like an industrial documentary on Dallas living rooms and shopping centers, puts it there in negative. A dead-watch-battery miasma pervades the film, a three in the afternoon of the soul.
...
The inadequacy of the film’s world seems normal and accurate, snapshots of the time as it was. In the end it’s a valid document of a place that did survive some kind of attack, but kept on going the same dull way, learning nothing.

Made for around $30 thousand ($250 thousand today) for AIP to fill out some TV deal they made. A remake of Roger Corman's It Conquered the World in 16mm color.

I thought maybe the scientist working with Zontar to take over the Earth and usher in a golden age was supposed to represent American Communists. But then the U.S. Army general whose mind was taken over by Zontar goes around telling people that "the Communists" are staging a revolt, using that as an excuse to enslave humanity. How many Communists did they think there were in the Dallas-Fort Worth area?

I liked Zontar himself with his leathery wings living in a big giant cave. John Agar as a two-fisted scientist who knocks people out with one punch or a single karate chop.

Paul Schrader's low budget tip

You know how Eric Rohmer made movies with long dialog scenes? And you know how one of his trademarks was that he'd show people going places in cars? If he didn't do this, some of the movies would haven taken place entirely in apartments, like they could have been filmed anywhere. Showing people driving through town gave a sense of place.

So here's an excerpt from an interview with Paul Schrader in Filmmaker Magazine discussing his movie The Canyons. The movie was made for a quarter million dollars but starred Lindsey Lohan among others. Read the interview here.

...Talk is cheap. So a microbudget film is mostly people sitting around talking. And if you have good dialogue and a good kind of story and interesting people, that can work. But it can start to feel like a stage play because you’re not spending money on action sequences. So in order to keep it from feeling like a stage play, you have to walk and talk, although not at the same time. So this film, it’s walk, walk, walk, talk, talk, talk, walk, walk, walk. That opens the structure up for music because you can just have these 50-second [music] cues [underneath] creating a mood. And then you get back into the talking again... In order to make a dialogue-driven microbudget film feel more kinetic, you have all these transportation scenes — how people are getting from one place to another — and those [require] big music cues. ... It just opens it up and makes it feel not very rushed. It’s nice. I mean, these music passages are one thing you couldn’t do for television. 

You want to see a movie where they didn't do this, see Henry Jaglom's Venice/Venice, filmed on location in Venice, Italy and Venice, California. They took the cast and crew to Italy for scenes of them sitting around a table talking.

Shia LaBeouf

Shia LaBeouf really did make a sacrifice for his "art". For years his female stans have been his most avid defenders. Now the only ones supporting him are Trumpian men who think he's being victimized by Feminists. They think shooting dogs is "method acting".

For years, every time LaBeouf committed some idiotic crime that threatened his movie career, he would start with what he thought was "art". Just being vaguely liberal was enough to get the anti-Trump forces on his side. I assume that's put a damper on misogynists coming to his defense. 

I hope to heck this is finally the end of that guy.

Vincente Minnilli, The Cobweb, 1955

You know all that crap George Lucas started about the "hero's journey", trying to make Star Wars seem like less of a fluke? People are still promoting that nonsense.

If you want an archetypal story, I say go with an Oedipal conflict.

There was the whole first season of Star Trek where Captain Kirk was always fighting someone trying to take over the ship, which I was a little surprised to learn is considered an Oedipal conflict. The first episode of the show, "Charlie X", was essentially a science fiction version of Oedipus Rex. Captain Kirk was clearly the aggressor in the conflict, humiliating Charlie for no reason. There've been a couple of movies about aging British school masters threatened by younger teachers displacing them. 

Shane took it further than most. In the opening scene, the father (Van Heflin) picks up a broken, unloaded rifle (what do you think that symbolized) that they gave to the kid to play with and tries to scare Shane with it. But Shane is a real man. He moves in. Van Heflin's wife falls in love with him and his son worships him. In the end, Helfin is going to go to town to intentionally get himself killed, and he comes right out and says he's doing it so Shane can sleep with his wife. Even then, Shane pistol whips him and takes his place in the final showdown.

This came to mind while watching this thing. Richard Widmark as a psychiatrist treating a patient who I guess has an Oedipal complex. When the young fellow is attracted to Widmark's wife, Gloria Grahame, he's afraid Widmark will do whatever father figures in these Oedipal struggles do.

A big soap opera around a private psychiatric clinic. Widescreen in Eastmancolor.

It was all right. With Lauren Becall, Charles Boyer and Lillian Gish. Oscar Levant was in there somewhere but I missed him.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Never Say Never Again (1983)

The only James Bond movie I didn't find disappointing. It turns out that Thunderball (1965) was produced by different people than the rest of the series. They owned the rights and could produce this stand-alone remake.

Stars 52-year-old Sean Connery. There was talk in the beginning of the film about him being too old. He was three years younger than Roger Moore and they were both younger than Tom Cruise is now.

With Barbara Carrera, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Kim Basinger and Rowan Atkinson; Edward Fox as M and Max Von Sydow in charge of SPECTRE.

I don't think it's possible to electronically control sharks and make them attack someone, but it was so impressive that Sean Connery was swimming around with real sharks that you forgot about that. There was a lot of scuba diving which Sean Connery reportedly hated doing, so that was really him down there.  

Has a sequence in which James Bond is equally adept at video games and ballroom dancing. When I saw this in a theater, some boys sitting near me noted that one of the guys had an impractical but aesthetic World War Two Japanese Nambu pistol.

Shia LaBeouf

FKA Twigs has filed suit against her ex-"boyfriend" Shia LaBeouf for sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress.

From Variety:

The musician was once woken up by LaBeouf towering over her, violently squeezing her arms against her will and choking her, according to the lawsuit. The alleged incident occurred during a trip to celebrate Valentine’s Day in 2019. As he was strangling her, the lawsuit claims, he was whispering, “If you don’t stop you are going to lose me.” After the alleged incident, LaBeouf became manic while driving back to his home. Barnett tried to get out of the car, as he threatened to crash the car, unless he professed her “eternal love” for him, and though he briefly stopped at a gas station, he “violently attacked” her, throwing her against the car, screaming in her face and attempting to strangle her, before forcing her to get back in the car.

And this:

When filming “The Tax Collector,” LaBeouf got so into character, according to the lawsuit, he took on the role of a gangster in real life, and claimed to drive around Los Angeles, shooting stray dogs dead, so that he could get into the “mindset” of a killer. Barnett, an animal lover, was “profoundly disturbed and terrified.”

He knowingly infected her with a sexually transmitted disease and has loaded guns around the house.

View a full copy of the lawsuit in the Variety article linked above.

Is anyone at all surprised by this?

 

Jack Webb vs. Frank Sinatra, Jr

Dragnet made me feel like even I could be a star. All you had to do was stand there and read your cue cards as fast as you could. But I saw this episode of Adam-12 which seemed to be a pilot for another series. Frank Sinatra, Jr, plays an investigator for the D.A.'s office. He seemed to be a Joe Friday substitute, but he was so bland and lifeless, he made Jack Webb look like---I don't know---Al Pacino or Frank Sinatra, Sr.

Come to think of it, toward the end, Marlon Brando had all his lines on cue cards or pinned to the actor he was speaking to.  

Live streaming movie channel

It was kind of nice. I got on Pluto, watched their live streaming movie channels. It was like watching regular TV! I could choose the channel but was unburdened by any choice beyond that. I watched the end of The Boys From Brazil. Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele, Lawrence Olivier as a Simon Wiesenthal-like Nazi-hunter. Sadly, Mengele was still alive when the movie was made and he died of old age rather than being ripped apart by dobermans. Jeremy Black as Hitler's bratty clone.

The Undoing (HBO "limited series") Nichole Kidman, Hugh Grant

Watching this thing, it dawned on me that I had no idea what Nichole Kidman looked like. About the only thing I've seen her in is Lars von Trier's Dogville which was years ago and was awful. Why do people like that guy?

The Undoing was directed by another Dane, Susanne Bier. Kidman plays a wealthy New York psychologist whose pediatric oncologist husband is accused of murdering his girlfriend, the mother of one of his patients. Their son, Noah Jupe, goes to an exclusive private school. One of his classmates is the victim's son.

In one scene, we learn that the victim was one of those rich people who likes to hang around naked in health club locker rooms. I've heard that's common among the upper classes.

I watched this thing after hearing Hugh Grant interviewed about it on Fresh Air. Terry Gross gave away the ending which made me think that it wasn't a mystery, but there are at least four suspects including Grant. Even the kid has a motive. I don't know how much that ruined it for me.

With Donald Sutherland as Kidman's rich father who has his own helicopter.

I didn't like Nichole Kidman at all. I think I'll go back to never watching her in anything.

Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

I saw this on TV when I was a kid and saw it as a pretty good true crime movie. Inspired by the case of Charles Starkweather whose crimes were worse than what was portrayed in the movie. I didn't really distinguish it from other movies of that type. Seeing it again now, I had the same reaction. I haven't seen any of Malick's other movies. If I did, that might cast a different light on it.

They really toned down Starkweather's crimes. In real life, he didn't leave anyone alive if he could help it. His victims included one toddler.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

I found Spencer Tracy using Jiu Jitsu less plausible every time I saw it, but it turns out the stuff I had doubts about was real. You really can grab someone's wrist with one hand and throw them. 

Black Rock is made even more isolated by wartime shortages. The place has one car, one Jeep and one hearse. Robert Ryan rules over the town with Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin as his dangerously dull-witted henchmen.

A technicolor film noir. With Dean Jagger, Ann Francis, and Walter Brennan. 

Available on the Criterion Channel.

A Time to Kill (1996)

Based on the John Grisham novel.

Years ago, there was an incident here. There was a noise complaint. A band was playing in a co-op near the university. The police tried to force their way in but the residents inside held the doors shut.

"We wanted to make sure they didn't come in without a warrant," the guy later told reporters.

Now, they also reported that an earlier case against the same people had been thrown out of court because the cops forced their way in without a warrant. All the evidence was thrown out. Why were these people so intent on making sure the cops didn't make the same mistake twice?

In this movie, the judge makes a ruling that violates established case law. It was reversible error. Instead of letting it go, instead of saving it in case he needs it to overturn his client's conviction on appeal, attorney Matthew McConaughey points out the judge's error to him. The judge gives the same decision against a change of venue, but this time he carefully considers it first as the law requires and doesn't dismiss it out of hand.

The movie is hard to take. It starts with a couple of subhuman Mississippi crackers raping and attempting to murder a Black child. Her father kills them as they're being brought to the courthouse to be arraigned, so he's charged with murder.

The Klan terrorizes the community. There's also a bizarre anti-NAACP subplot. I don't know what Grisham had against them. 

Had this dramatic music that seemed old fashioned at times. It made me think of Bernard Hermann's score for Taxi Driver. I liked it, but it seemed out of place. I would have liked more of it.

With Samuel L. Jackson, Sandra Bullock, Donald Sutherland and his boy, Kiefer. Kevin Spacey as the snotty prosecutor.

Loving (2016)

The Loving family, 1967.

I have a friend in Russia who wrote to me when Obama was elected. She was completely baffled why people were so excited about it. And she was right---he was just another right-wing Democrat a la Clinton or Biden. I wrote back that I agreed with her, but, among other things, that when Obama was born, his parents could not legally marry or live in 16 states where inter-racial marriage was a crime and that his election was seen as a triumph over racism.

Loving is about the couple in Loving vs. Virginia, the case which ended anti-misegenation laws in the U.S.

Virginia cops came bursting into their home in the middle of the night. They wanted to catch them having sex because interracial sex was an even more serious crime than interracial marriage. They had gone to the District of Columbia to get married and returned to Virginia. This was a crime.

They pled guilty and were ordered to immediately leave Virginia and not come back together for 25 years. They could come back one at a time.

It's still amazing how backward the south was.

Some years later, the ACLU took their case. They had to return to Virginia and face re-arrest and years in prison to appeal their conviction. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned their conviction unanimously.

According to Wikipedia, Alabama continued to enforce its anti-misegenation laws until 1970.

The movie was probably more true-to-life and thus a bit unstructured. The characters didn't have a single-minded goal like they have in most movie.

There's often a portrayal of Civil Rights actions as spontaneous, not the result of careful planning and strategizing. Rosa Parks is often presented as having just been especially tired the day she refused to give up her seat on the bus. There are people who see deliberate challenges to racist laws as somehow insincere. I've seen ostensibly liberal whites outraged over acts of political symbolism. But here it was a case where a couple got married with no thought of it as a political act.

Available on Netflix

Schizoid (1980)

Were these old slasher movies really that bad? The death toll was pretty low compared with other, far more respectable movies. How many people were killed in The Grapes of Wrath? How many people in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World would have not survived in real life? I'm not sure how to calculate how objectionable a movie is.

Members of Klaus Kinski's therapy group are being murdered by a mysterious figure who stabs them to death with scissors. I assumed Kinski was doing it because look at him, but he played a wealthy psychiatrist and the killer drove a Mazda GLC.

 

A 1980 Golan-Globus production, made one year after Kinski starred in Nosferatu, two years before Fitzcarraldo. 

There's a scene where a white woman makes no attempt to conceal her hysterical fear of a Black man in an elevator. In fairness, he WAS chewing gum and wearing sunglasses. The woman was later terrified of a janitor played by Christopher Lloyd.

With Joe Regalbuto of Murphy Brown.

 

Free with Amazon Prime.

The Black Cat (1934)

Edgar Ulmer directed The Black Cat for Universal in 1934. It was a huge hit and it should have moved him up to making big budget movies, but it turned out he was sleeping with the wife of the studio head's nephew, so that put a damper on his career and he went to work in the poverty row studios.

I'd never seen The Black Cat, but with all the terrible 1930's B movies I've watched---horror movies without horror, science fiction without science, thrillers without thrills, westerns that were just idiotic---I thought, how good could this thing be? 

I did finally watch it and it was beautiful, just brilliant. Set in Europe about men traumatized by World War One. 

The movie Ed Wood brought up the rivalry between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. The Black Cat made it clear that Lugosi was the better man.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Pressure Point (1962)

 

Sidney Poitier plays a prison psychiatrist during World War Two. He treats Bobby Darin who plays a Nazi who's been convicted of sedition.

You remember The Boys From Brazil? It took the view that Hitler's problem was that he was spoiled by his doting step-father/uncle. In this one, Poitier discovers that Darin became a Nazi because of his horrible drunken abusive father. His mother wasn't abusive but she was no picnic.

Barry Gordon plays Darin as a child. This was just a year after the little fellow played Jack Benny as a kid on his show. I hope the guy playing his father wasn't really hitting him. In one scene, the father, a butcher by trade, menaces his son with a large cow's liver which he shoves in his face.

Extreme racism has never been classified as a mental illness simply because it's so common. There are so many Nazis and people who may as well be Nazis, it's hard to imagine that they're all former abused children. Some of them seemed to have perfectly nice families who publicly disowned them after they revealed themselves to be Nazis in the press.

And, I won't give it away, but things don't go all that well in this movie, either.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

A Matter of WHO (UK, 1961)

I thought it would be something for the pandemic. A flight makes an emergency landing in London. An American oil company executive on board is gravely ill with smallpox, it turns out. Terry-Thomas plays an investigator for the World Health Organization who tracks down the infection. 

The movie has a crooked oil deal subplot. Terry-Thomas is an eccentric who speeds through London traffic in a then-30-year-old Austin 7. I watched it with my mother who had a neighbor in the 1930's who drove one, but she didn't recognize it.

This may show my ignorance, but the only actors I recognized were Terry-Thomas and Honor Blackman who went on to play Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.

You know who the villain is the instant they say his name. They stole a thing from The Third Man except it was in a cable car in Switzerland rather than a giant Ferris wheel in Vienna.  It has a scene where they put on masks before going into an infected house which seems perfectly natural now. Early on, Terry-Thomas demonstrates how close you have to stand to someone to spread the disease through casual conversation.

It wasn't great. A comedy that wasn't funny with at least a couple of deaths from a horrible disease.  Available on Pub-D-Hub.

Happy Valley (2014)

 I probably said all this before, but it's been a few years if I have.

There was the president of an east coast university who resigned in disgrace after being arrested for making obscene phone calls from his office. He kept calling a woman who advertised her services as a babysitter, so a wealthy university president targeted a woman without a permanent job. But students at the university rallied for him to stay. Just because he was an obscene phone caller, it didn't mean he shouldn't continue at his job. It's not like he was a flasher.

There was kind of an extreme case near here. A high school teacher working in a small town came up with an elaborate plan to murder his wife's boyfriend. He showed up at the guy's door but the victim easily fought him off. The teacher fled leaving behind his backpack full of murder supplies and a to-do list. He was suspended from his job while awaiting trial. The students circulated a petition calling for him to be allowed to teach. They had taken their civics lessons to heart. He hadn't been convicted. Who knows, maybe he DIDN'T do it!

 

I myself have seen anarchist university students launch a wave of vandalism and protest in defense of the university president who seemed like kind of a jerk. He was rude to members of the student government and groveled at the feet of a billionaire because he donated money to the university. He was fired by the state board of higher education. There was nothing to recommend this guy to any anarchist. I can't imagine Communists acting like this.

So, I don't know. Maybe the idiocy of sports fandom wasn't entirely to blame for the Penn State riots. No one working in any educational setting should be flattered when their students come to their defense. 

I was wide awake in the middle of the night. I thought I could turn on the TV and put myself to sleep. I turned on the HBO movie Paterno, but realized it wasn't going to be about a money-grubbing football coach covering up child molestation so as not to jeopardize his multi-million dollar income. So I turned on this documentary instead. Happy Valley. 

Turned out I had seen it before. It didn't focus on the riots. It didn't show violent drunks shouting their love for "Joe Pa", but it did show some belligerent adults. They had made a pilgrimage to Penn State to take pictures of themselves with a statue of "Joe Pa". They were outraged that a pensioner who was anti-child molestation stood with a sign protesting its presence. They shout abuse at him. A woman tries to shove him aside then her cretinous husband lumbers over and threatens him for attacking his wife. A really dumb-looking one stomps over like he's going to attack him then tears up his sign in a fit of rage.

The movie focuses on Sandusky's adopted son. He was ten years old when Sandusky got a court order taking him away from his mother who fought to keep him. A court ordered him to move in with the child molester. He was separated from his family, then, years later, when he reported that he was molested, the ghastly Sandusky clan shunned him.

Horrible neighbor may be a film major

A completely different person who has nothing to do with them.

I drove up and parked in front of my house. One of the loud neighbors next door---one of the rich bastards from California whose parents bought the house for them to live in while they went to the university which means they'll be there for years without hope of them moving out---was outside walking around with a steadycam with a large SLR. 

Maybe he's a film major. He obviously has rich parents. There aren't film schools in California?

Those people are assholes. They can't go out in their yard without setting up speakers outside to blare their terrible music. I'm not the only one they're annoying, but I'm the only one who yells at them to turn it off. 

I waited until he stopped filming because I didn't want to be captured on video. I thought for a moment that it was too bad I kept yelling at them and calling the police because now I can't converse pleasantly with them about what they're doing. Then I thought, no, I don't want to talk to them. To hell with them.

The Homecoming (1973)

The Criterion Channel is featuring the work of Nobel laureate Harold Pinter. This was a play filmed with the original cast as it appeared on stage about a degenerate family in North London.

A retired father, his brother who works as a chauffeur and his two sons, one a pimp, the other trying to be a boxer, live together in a house the two older men inherited from their mother. A third son, a philosophy professor working at a university in California, returns unannounced with his new wife who the others meet for the first time. 

Turns out the apple doesn't fall far from the tree even if it does have a PhD. The wife is a surprisingly good sport.

Paul Rogers, Ian Holm, Cyril Cusack, Terence Rigby, Michael Jayston and Vivian Merchant. That's the full cast.

It was great. It was brilliant. And it might make a good double feature with Ride the High Country. You'll see why.

Stay back from people who look like this

Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski has COVID-19 and was probably contagious when these pictures were taken a week ago.

He doesn't look like someone named Corey.

Election (1999)

I was sitting in a restaurant years ago, alone, reading a newspaper. It was the Portland paper, not the local news. A high school teacher had written a letter to the editor. She defended her school's decision to kick a kid out for publishing an underground newspaper because the paper revealed that one of the teachers was sleeping with a student.

The woman's letter didn't make sense. She argued that the teacher would be denied a fair trial if high school kids knew about his crimes, like they were potential jurors. 

But the point here is that teachers will often defend any act of depravity as long as it's committed by another teacher against a student.

Election (1999) stars Matthew Broderick as a conniving high school teacher who blames student body presidential candidate Reese Witherspoon for another teacher getting fired for molesting her.

Come to think of it, I was slightly acquainted with a guy in high school. I don't remember who he was. But he said he once ran for student council. I didn't witness this, but he said there was an event where all the candidates had a few minutes to address the school. He stepped up to the microphone and mumbled some jokes. My impression was that he didn't say anything coherent. He said that after the event, he laughed when the principal told him he might have to suspend him. That sort of thing happened in the movie, too.

And, by the way, when I started high school, the student body president spoke to the in-coming students. He started with a joke. He said how happy he was that all of his friends were there to support him-- "I see both of you are here."

That got a laugh. I laughed. Then I remembered that I only had two actual friends myself. Was I really so unpopular?

Lifetime, Hallmark channels back in action

 

I feel like signing up for the Lifetime Movie Channel again. They were awful. I could watch them with little feeling of inferiority.

Apparently these movies are back in production. Read the whole story here from Connecticut:

https://www.theday.com/article/20201101/ENT09/201109988

Synthetic Cinema International, the Rocky Hill-based film company, is usually flat-out busy making movies for, say, Hallmark or Lifetime — and is usually shooting those projects in Connecticut.

When the pandemic hit in mid-March, Synthetic’s filming came to a sudden halt.

Finally, come June, Synthetic started shooting again, first with a romance filmed primarily in Putnam and Woodstock and then a thriller in towns including East Lyme, New London and Ledyard.

Andrew Gernhard, Synthetic’s co-founder and producer, says that as far as he knows, their romantic drama/comedy “One Royal Holiday” was the first movie to go into production on the East Coast after the pandemic shut everything down. He believes that “Stalker’s Prey 3” was the second movie to be shot in Connecticut after the lockdown, following “One Royal Family.”

While the productions had to follow all the expected COVID safety protocols, one of the other big changes was the necessity of limiting the number of extras.

In “Stalker’s Prey,” they did use some extras — but only about 20 over two or three days. The extras were given COVID tests, had their temperatures taken and were kept away from the main cast and crew.

“One Royal Holiday,” on the other hand, needed more people. There is a big parade, for instance, that might normally feature 200 extras. Instead, Synthetic used green-screen technology.

“We got a bunch of extras, we put them in front of a green screen and shot them, then we had them change and shot them again,” Gernhard says. “We’re going to actually green screen them into different backgrounds and foregrounds.”

*  *  *

Making movies during COVID

“Making a movie is stressful because of all the moving parts,” Gernhard says. “This (COVID) adds, no joke, about 35 percent more stress. The logistics alone are insane. … It’s not fun. You know, (in the end), I don’t feel accomplished, I feel relieved. Because I legitimately have been a stress ball the entire time.”

Gernhard says they were lucky in that the screenplays for both movies “were originally written a little bit tighter and a little bit smaller, and a little more intimate anyway, and we did a slight rewrite to both to make them a little more COVID compliant.”

For instance, they tried not to have too many scenes set in public places.

On set, they adhered to the expected safety protocols: wear a three-ply mask; socially distance; do as much outside as possible and, if things have to be done inside, limit the amount of crew and cast involved. Everyone was tested multiple times a week and mostly stayed at their hotels or inns, tending to restrict themselves in terms of off-hours activities to outdoor pursuits like golf and jogging. 

A ‘Royal’ romance

Synthetic began filming “One Royal Holiday” in June mostly in Putnam and Woodstock, and Gernhard says, “At that point, (those towns) only had, like, 11 cases of COVID. On purpose, I chose that location, never mind that they have beautiful inns there.”

They shot at the Inn at Woodstock Hill and the Mansion at Bald Hill.

“That was our bubble. Our cast and crew and everything was up at these two inns, and that was it,” Gernhard says, adding with a laugh, “It was actually kind of a summer vacation.”

In “One Royal Holiday,” a nurse heading home from work not long before Christmas runs into people who need a place to stay during the oncoming blizzard. She brings them to her father’s inn, and it turns out they are the queen and prince of (the fictional country of) Galwick. As the nurse and the prince fall for each other, he learns to be a better person.

“One Royal Holiday” features a lot of Broadway actors. With Broadway closed for the foreseeable future, these talented but usually busy performers were available. In addition, Synthetic tried to limit travel for the movies because of COVID, and Broadway performers tend to live in or close enough to Connecticut to drive rather than fly to the locations.

“One Royal Holiday” stars Aaron Tveit, who was just nominated for a Tony for his performance in the stage adaptation of “Moulin Rouge!,” and Laura Osnes, who earned Tony nominations in past years for playing Bonnie Parker in “Bonnie and Clyde” and Cinderella in “Cinderella.” “One Royal Holiday” isn’t a musical, but there is some singing.

Trump declares himself the winner

 

I got to see the historic moment on live TV. Trump declared himself the winner and will go to the Supreme Court to stop the vote count. He did what he said he'd do. Stunning but not surprising. Things have gone exactly as predicted.

Garden State (2004)

Acting.

Zach Braff plays an actor in Los Angeles who has apparently refused to speak to his father in New Jersey for some time. When his father calls to inform him that his mother is dead, Braff flies home for her funeral. He hangs around with his quirky friends and with Natalie Portman. 

His father is a psychiatrist. In spite of being alienated from him for years, Braff has continued taking the medication he prescribed for him all this time. It has left him unable to feel emotion which you'd think would be a serious impediment for an actor, but that may have been the point.

I watched a little of it, didn't like it. I googled it and read something explaining why people once liked it but later turned against it and against Braff himself. Something about an anti-hipster backlash. 

I liked it better after reading that and watched the rest. 

Just seemed kind of middling. People enthused over Braff's taste in music when it came out and I guess it was good although music doesn't interest me. He's like Woody Allen going through his record collection for music for his movies.

Irrational Man, Woody Allen, 2015

Allen's memoir went on at length about how poorly educated he was which made all the talk in the early scenes about academics and philosophy seem false and embarrassing. But once it gets past that it was pretty good.

An impotent alcoholic depressive (Joaquin Phoenix) arrives at a northeastern college where he'll be teaching philosophy. Someone tells him he needs a "muse". He starts dating a student, but it's only plotting a murder that gives him a new lease on life. He cheers up, starts eating better and his sexual dysfunction goes away.

The movie is like a cross between Strangers on a Train and another thing.

The plot twist in the third act wasn't much of a surprise. A little surprised at how he dealt with it, though.

The Traitor (Il Traditore) 2019

The true story of Sicilian mafioso Tommaso Buscetta who turns informant when a rival crime family decides to exterminate his entire extended family murdering everyone over the age of six. 

Almost any time you see someone riding in a car, you know something terrible is going to happen.

I assume the Italian courtroom scenes were accurate since it was an Italian movie, but they were the strangest I've seen. The defendants were locked in cages in the back of the courtroom where they kept shouting abuse at the witnesses who sat behind bulletproof glass. Witnesses could question and insult each other. Defendants sometimes did their own questioning. If it had been an American movie, I would have thought they made it up based entirely on crude Italian stereotypes.

Which was, to some extent, how the scenes set in the United States were done. Buscetta is in the witness protection program in the United States. Those scenes were apparently filmed in Germany, and the street scene did look like it might have been in New England. While shopping for groceries, he stops at the gun counter to buy an assault rifle. Of course, Wal-Mart does sell both guns and groceries, but they have a separate sporting goods section.

Directed by Marco Bellocchio.

Two and a half hours. I got a Starz free trial just to see it.

Eat My Dust! (1976)

Turns out to be a Halloween movie.

To impress a girl, Ron Howard steals Dave Madden's stock car and leads police on a series of high speed chases. There's no way he was insured. Howard's father is sheriff so he orders the cops not to kill him. I found the scene where they destroy a Chinese restaurant especially offensive. And was that a baby carriage he ran over? It only had a pumpkin in it, but he didn't know that.

They made a compromise on the movie poster. Ron Howard wears a Civil War cap throughout the movie. They gave him one in blue instead of the traitorous, racist, pro-slavery gray, but on the poster, they put a miscolored Confederate flag on the front.

I think it was because of the flag I that avoided watching it when it was on HBO back then, and there was just something that bothered me about Ron Howard. I came across the movie this morning on a live channel on Pluto.

Produced by Roger Corman. Written and directed by Charles B. Griffith. Howard got to direct the sequel, Grand Theft Auto. 

Free with Amazon Prime if nowhere else.

Tarzan's Secret Treasure (1941)

 

It wasn't a pandemic, certainly. Don't even know if it was an epidemic, strictly speaking, but there's a deadly infectious disease. 

Jane tells Boy about civilization, so the little fellow leaves a note saying he's running away to see it and will be back in couple of days. He's chased by a lion and he saves an African kid (Cordell Hickman) from a rampaging rhinoceros. They return to Cordell's village in time to see his mother die from an illness. The people there decide to burn Boy at the stake but Tarzan appears and saves him. Tarzan decides to adopt Cordell without checking if he has other relatives. The kid disappears by the next movie.

The rest is like the other movies in the series. An expedition of greedy whites shows up. They want the gold that's lying around Tarzan's treehouse. At least one dies of the disease and Boy is stricken as well. They think they've killed Tarzan and kidnap Jane and Boy. Tarzan goes from apparent death to Christ-like resurrection. I can't remember if he kills the people who kidnapped his wife and child. Usually he rescues them from the locals then lets them die on their own. I always thought this was a glaring weakness of the series, that and the appalling racism.

Cordell Hickman had been in Biscuit Eater before this and had smaller roles in several movies after it. His last credit on IMDb was in 1946.

Monsieur Lazhar (Canada, 2011)

When a teacher hangs herself in her classroom, an Algerian refugee, Bashir Lazhar, is hired to take over her class. The 6th graders are shaken, especially the boy who found her. He blames himself for her death. The other students blame him, too, as do, apparently, the teachers and principal.

Early on, the principal explains to Lazhar that he cannot touch the students. He can't hit them, he can't hug them, nothing. Another teacher chuckles that she used to twist kids' ears and the principal says that she used to hit her students. The teachers are resisting the urge to hurt them, not hug them.

Lazhar is the only one who was appalled that a teacher would kill herself in her classroom knowing her students would find her. Did the kid do something terrible to her, or did she do something terrible to him?

In French. It was nominated for an Oscar best foreign language film. 

Save the Tiger, 1973

Jack Lemmon and Jack Gilford own a company in the garment industry. They seem perfectly relatable except Jack Lemmon hires prostitutes for his buyers, they cheated on their taxes and look into hiring an arsonist to avoid bankruptcy and prison. They care about their employees. They committed a serious crime to keep the place open so the girls could keep working, but the arsonist points out their countless fire code violations.

I watched a person become increasingly corrupt just running a small business. Don't let it happen to you.

Lemmon won an Oscar for his performance and Jack Gilford was nominated for best supporting actor. I heard in an interview once that they showed the movie to Billy Wilder before it came out. There was a beautifully acted scene early in the film. Wilder agonized for a moment and suggested they cut it. It threw off the flow of the movie.

Watching it again, sort of remembering the brief description of the scene I heard twenty years ago, I wonder if they just moved it to the end.

Presidential debate: This always happens

This always happens with presidential debates. The incumbent performs lousily in the first debate then makes a comeback in the next one. Happened with Reagan, with Obama---those are the only two I really remember. 

Now it's happening with Trump. Obviously he was going to calm down for the second one.

Biden could have refused to debate him again and who would have blamed him. But we'll see how it goes.

Mommy's Secret (Lifetime movie, 2016)

I lost interest by then, but the woman's daughter was tied up for some reason.

A bourgeois woman puts on a fake goatee and robs banks to cover her son's gambling debts. The son, it's explained, is just trying to help provide for his recently widowed mother in the only way open to him, but he keeps losing more and more. 

It could have been a terrible version of Breaking Bad or a weird, non-comedic Fun with Dick and Jane, but they copped out. First they show that she's FORCED to rob banks by the criminals her son owes money to, then---I don't know how much it matters if this is a spoiler---it turns out she was working with the police the whole time to put their operation out of business.

There was a Romanian movie where a school teacher turns to crime to pay off a loan shark. It seemed crazy, but under the circumstances the movie was neutral on whether this was wrong. Now that I think about it, it started with her stealing money from her students, but I think it was to show how pitifully desperate she was, not that she was a monster. [Turns out the movie was Bulgarian, called The Lesson (Urok) and it wasn't clear she stole the kid's money.]

Zachary Ty Bryan again

In happier times.

Checked the news. If they're arraigning Zachary Ty Bryan this morning, they aren't reporting it ahead of time. It'd be weird if they did. 

In the news, it sounded like Bryan and his girlfriend had an apartment in town, like he was living here. 

When I was a kid, I heard that Bill Bixby owned a ranch near here and Cliff Robertson once had a house outside town. Robert Ryan's son lives a few blocks from me. But that's not as exciting as having a washed up child actor living here, one who apparently resides in a less fashionable part of town and could be coaxed into lending his still-recognizable name to the surprising number of zero budget movies being made around here. He could be a big fish if he played his cards right.

At the very least, he could be a celebrity spokesman for some local business. Do some commercials. 

The strangling thing would be a problem, and his appearances on Fox News. His last acting credits were in 2009, but he's worked as a producer since then, so his career may not be on the rocks just yet. He may have just come here to sweat out the pandemic. 

TMZ reports that he made bail today. They reported somewhere that there's been a flurry of internet searches to find out who his girlfriend is. People are still interested. 

Lifetime movies

These Lifetime Channel movies are so odd. I really should like them.

I started to watch one about a mother forced to rob banks to pay her teenage son's gambling debts. There was one that was based on a novel that was weirdly popular in the 1970's about a woman who tries to return home to her wealthy parents after her husband dies in the 1950's. She and her husband had been cruelly shunned for years because they were brother and sister. In another, a nanny turns the children against their mother and tries to legally adopt them. There's one about a girl whose new psychopath friend at school tries to murder her regular friend. A disturbed middle aged woman moves in with relatives and tries to recreate the high school prom she didn't attend. I just read the description. I didn't see it.

I watched just the opening credits of one. It was produced by The Asylum, the company that makes the Sharknado movies among others, which seemed fitting.

The characters in these things are bourgeois, all living in huge houses. Lifetime reportedly took a survey. Their viewers live in single family homes so their movies about people living in single family homes. It was refreshing when the "young" people in Boy in the Attic fled in an old Town Car. I'm happy with women as main characters, but not horrible rich women. 

In the ones I watched, the women were also gun-owners.

Perhaps ironically, the movies each cost around $1.25 million. They're making low budget movies about rich people.

I brought this up with a couple of regular movies. There was A Simple Plan, a thriller about three working class men in a small town who live in houses that are too big and too new and Young Adult where a successful author returns to her home town. The simple townsfolk who never thought to leave for the big city live in McMansions. This how Jason Reitman thinks the proletariat lives. He can't figure out what they're complaining about.