I haven't been following the trial, but I read something about it.
"Good lord! Is this true?" I thought.
I googled it and found other articles reporting the same thing.
Jessica Mann testified that Harvey Weinstein has no testicles:
“The first time I saw him fully naked,” she said, “I thought he was deformed and intersex. He has an extreme scarring that I didn’t know, maybe [he] was a burn victim …”
“He does not have testicles, and it appears that he has a vagina,” she claimed, saying she had oral sex with Weinstein.
As Mann claimed that he had deformed genitals, Weinstein dropped his head.
“He also peed on me once,” she also said of Weinstein, who is 67.
Prosecutor Joan Illuzzi asked Mann to describe Weinstein’s hygiene.
“It was very bad,” she said. “He smelled like shit — excuse me, sorry, like poop. He just was dirty.”
Read the rest of it here if you want. That's a link to Vulture. There are other horrible things.
As I understand it, she had consensual sex with Weinstein. If that's the case, then that girl is truly a saint. And Weinstein is even a bigger monster for later raping her.
Bernie Sanders will be cheated out of the nomination. He'll be a good sport and campaign for the right-wing Democrat they install as candidate. Trump will be re-elected and corporate Democrats will still blame Sanders and his supporters.
Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. You never know.
Some jackass was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona. He was, according to the press, a "graffiti artist" known as "Penis Man" because he spraypaints the words "Penis Man" on buildings.
Police want [Dustin] Shomer, who's 38, charged with one felony count of criminal trespassing at a critical public service facility, eight counts of misdemeanor criminal damage-defacing, and 16 felony counts of aggravated criminal damage-defacing a school.
Tagging the front door of Tempe's municipal building may have been the final straw for authorities.
Shomer's Facebook page says he previously studied Japanese Language and Literature at ASU, and has also studied "economic history/Japanese Language" at Waseda University, which is in Tokyo.
According to court records obtained by New Times on Monday, police believe Shomer wrote "Penis Man" at several locations in Tempe and Phoenix between January 19 and 21, including "local restaurants in Tempe, Tempe City Hall, 'A' Mountain, fenced public water towers, and 15 separate locations on ASU Tempe Campus and one ASU Phoenix campus."
Someone must have complained to the Phoenix newspaper. They initially called him a "graffiti artist" but changed it to "graffiti tagger" in later reports.
What a masterpiece!
I'm sorry I posted this. The poor guy has some serious mental health issues.
I'm sitting here with Lord of the Flies on Roku. I watched a twenty minute video first of director Peter Brooks talking about the making of the movie. It sounded surprisingly easy. His first big problem was getting the producer not to put in too much money. The studio kept raising the budget and wanted to punch up the story. They thought there should be girls in it and thought the kids just sitting around an island wasn't enough---they should be GOING somewhere. Like it's a really big island and they're trying to get to some other place on the island.
Brooks gave up on that producer. They got $300,000 from someone else to make the movie and spent half that money paying back the studio for that they had put into it so they could get the rights to the story back.
The $150 thousand they say the movie cost is equal to $1.25 million today, which is still a fortune for anything but a movie.
They filmed in Puerto Rico. Some of the kids' Moms came along and pitched in to take care of them. Other parents came to visit during the filming and they were put to work.
If it were me, I would be afraid of having a kid walk off and get lost or disappear into the ocean. I'd want a few lifeguards standing by. I saw a "documentary" about a photo shoot of swimsuit models in a remote location far from help and it had the photographer worried. He thought the models were terribly brave to agree to it.
The kid who played Simon said that when they filmed the scene of him being killed, the director made it very, very clear to the kids that they were to not actually stab or kill him. So the director did give some thought to safety issues.
There was a '70's movie called Bugsy Malone, a gangster musical performed entirely by children. It was filmed in England. Jodie Foster was in it and said she was terrified of the English kids. So Lord of the Flies was probably pretty accurate in how the kids were portrayed.
When they made another, Americanized Lord of the Flies in the 1990's--they made it about wealthy American military school kids on their way home from a field trip to Australia--a critic said it wasn't the same. The British are so civilized. Watching American kids spiral into savagery doesn't seem like nearly as big a deal, but he was wrong. Realistically, American kids would have behaved so much better.
Rapist millionaire Kobe Bryant is no more. He and his 13-year-old daughter were among nine people who perished in a helicopter crash. He had a net worth of $600 million. I don't know what he paid the teenager he was accused of raping, but under Colorado law at the time, the most she could collect was $2.5 million. He bought his wife a $4 million diamond as an apology for what he claimed was perfectly consensual adultery.
I didn't follow the case. I didn't know who he was. Sports don't interest me. I'm sorry the guy's dead but I'm surprised at how long CNN's continuing coverage is going on.
After being dragged through the mud for months by the media and by Bryant's legal team, the girl dropped the charges before they went to trial on the condition that Bryant apologize. One of his lawyers read his statement in court:
First, I want to apologize directly to the young woman involved in
this incident. I want to apologize to her for my behavior that night and
for the consequences she has suffered in the past year. Although this
year has been incredibly difficult for me personally, I can only imagine
the pain she has had to endure. I also want to apologize to her parents
and family members, and to my family and friends and supporters, and to
the citizens of Eagle, Colo.I also want to make it clear that I
do not question the motives of this young woman. No money has been paid
to this woman. She has agreed that this statement will not be used
against me in the civil case. Although I truly believe this encounter
between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not
view this incident the same way I did. After months of reviewing
discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I
now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.I
issue this statement today fully aware that while one part of this case
ends today, another remains. I understand that the civil case against
me will go forward. That part of this case will be decided by and
between the parties directly involved in the incident and will no longer
be a financial or emotional drain on the citizens of the state of
Colorado.
Remember all the mockery universities got when they called on students to actually ask permission before trying to have sex with fellow students? Seems like a pretty good idea. It could have saved Bryant a few million dollars.
Harvey Weinstein's lawyers have moved for a mistrial after prosecutors showed jurors a picture Weinstein with Bill Clinton. They think it will prejudice the jury against him. That's pretty bad when being friends with a former president makes you a probable sex criminal.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton said she hasn't decided yet if she would endorse Bernie Sanders for president if he won the nomination. She said that "nobody likes him". She reaffirmed this to reporters. Reaction was so bad that she issued a clarification that she actually meant she would endorse any Democrat who got the nomination.
Hillary shows that right-wing Democrats aren't right-wing because they think it's the only way to win. It's because they're right-wing ideologues. Democrats keep running as conservatives and they keep losing. They argue that they just have to be ever so slightly to the left of the Republicans---the left will have no choice but to vote for them and some Republicans would vote for them, too. It never works. Carter lost, Mondale lost, Dukakis lost, Bill Clinton won only because of Ross Perot, Gore lost, Kerry lost, Obama won because people thought he was a liberal, and now the other Clinton lost. The Democrats keep losing because the right-wing ideologues running the Democratic Party would rather lose than have anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan win.
When Obama beat Clinton and got the nomination, some of Clinton's "feminist" supporters announced they would vote for McCain. Cynthia McKinney was running on the Green Party ticket---if they were feminists and thought they were so liberal, why didn't they vote for her?
The Hypnotist, Anna Biller's 44 minute spoof of old Hollywood Technicolor films, was beautifully shot. Much better movie that I expected. A dying rich guy forces his three adult children who hate each other to live together permanently if they want to inherit his money. They plot against each other, one bringing in a hypnotist. It would have been so easy to do badly.
Exemplifies my conviction that low budget feature films should be scaled back to about forty minutes. Ninety minute movies are unnecessarily long in this era of streaming video. If you're not going out to a movie theater, there's no reason to drag them out that long. And even if you are showing them theatrically, two forty minute movies will be better than one eighty minute one if your working on an extremely small budget.
Up until the '50's, low budget B movies were often only an hour long. And that was plenty long. I've seen B westerns from the '30's that were less than 50 minutes, and they were pretty good, not so much because they were shorter but because they were more violent and seemed be aimed at adults. I've never seen any point in singing cowboys.
I don't know how many years ago this was. I watched a movie with a friend. We rented it from a video store specializing in movies that weren't very good. We watched a Mexican horror film, Night of the Bloody Apes. A doctor has transplanted the heart of a gorilla into his dying son. It causes his son to periodically turn into an ape man, sneak out of the house and attack women.
A detective investigating the attacks is dating a woman wrestler. He stakes out the park where the attacks have been taking place and inexplicably asks his girlfriend to walk down there alone in the dark to bring him some coffee.
"Oh, good!" I thought.
I assumed she was going to use her wrestling skills to battle the ape man.
But, no. She didn't even try. Her boyfriend saves her.
The first Mexican movie I saw with women wrestlers had a lovely scene where the two women hear someone breaking in so they get in their beds and pretend to be asleep. When the criminals walk in, they spring from their beds and effortlessly beat the crap out of them.
I thought this sort of thing would happen in all the movies, but it never did. The women wrestlers are never a match for any male character. It's like the old Charlie's Angels where we see them in the opening credits shooting guns and practicing jui-jitsu, but they turn into frail fashion models when confronted by criminals.
I saw this movie back in the '70's and it seems like it was taken seriously at the time. Based on the Ira Levin novel.
It's been pointed out that Josef Mengele was alive when the movie was made. It was rather flattering to him, presenting him as a genius who came up with the idea of cloning Hitler in the 1940's and leading a group of Nazis in South America.
Lawrence Olivier stars as a Simon Wiesenthal-like Nazi-hunter. Gregory Peck as Mengele. Introducing Jeremy Black playing multiple roles as horrible, obnoxious tween Hitler clones.
Jeremy Black was a stage actor. I don't know why he didn't do any more movies. Was he typecast as Hitler's clone?
Mengele and other surviving Nazis have produced a number of Hitler clones. They adopt them out to families that are similar to Hitler's, to families where the father is significantly older than the mother, for one thing. Hitler's father apparently died when he was twelve, so the Nazis start murdering the adoptive fathers as the clones turn twelve.
At the end, tween clone Hitler seems more on the ball than most tweens would under the circumstances, but he's still a little Hitler.
The movie seems to take the view that Hitler's problem was that he was spoiled by his over-the-hill father who was so happy that he finally got to adopt a child at his age.
Christopher Hitchens once pointed out that Hitler never had a real job until he became fuhrer. Could a homeless unemployed postcard artist become leader of a country today? There was a US general who gave a speech to the troops enthusing over Bush in Hitler-like terms. He said that God must have sent him to lead the country because he came out of nowhere, he became president even though he had never really done anything and he didn't even win the election (he was serious).
For that matter, I don't know what Obama ever did for a living and Trump-Hitler parallels go without saying.
I guess I'm watching a lot of Burt Lancaster movies. I watched The Swimmer again today, watched The Sweet Smell of Success a few days ago and Atlantic City which I wrote about on here.
I just watched Come Back Little Sheeba, a depressing story about an aging, isolated couple, their lives ravaged by the husband's alcoholism. It was almost like Of Mice and Men or Midnight Cowboy in that the husband and wife were cut off from their families. They had no one but each other and they weren't doing each other much good.
Shirley Booth as Lola seems a little like Edith Bunker. She's very kind and pitiful in her way, pining for her lost dog, with a husband who's terribly stodgy now that he's off the bottle and in recovery. But she had a seedy side. She leers at the college boy modeling for the art student they rent a room to and she tells her husband she's been sitting in the dark watching them make out.
Their lives seemed okay to me if they'd just cheer up.
We ordered glasses online for my mother. She had a prescription and after a few weeks we finally got online and found some. I had to measure the distance between her pupils. She wanted glasses that resembled a pair of reading glasses she had that she liked and had gotten nothing but compliments on, and they did look good.
I had some doubt about the wisdom of this approach.
"Look at these. What about these." I said.
Well. I don't remember what day we ordered them, but they arrived. They were slightly larger than the reading glasses but they look good and they were cheap. $31 including everything.
I think you can get frames with plain glass lenses very cheap if you need them for a movie.
I saw the comedian Hannibal Burres on TV. He had LASIK surgery to correct his eyesight but said it ruined his appearance. Without his glasses, he had beady little eyes. So he wore glasses with plain glass lenses which he tossed aside.
I've been meaning to get an eye exam for years. I walk around wearing reading glasses all the time, like an old guy.
When I was in junior high, I saw a kid I knew at school. He was in a Payless. He was looking at a late 1970's computer they had on display. His father walked over. I don't know if his father was old or if he just seemed old because he was balding and walking around wearing a sweater and reading glasses.
"What are you destroying now?" he said humorlessly.
I didn't know his son to be destructive or clumsy. I ran into him years later. He had an advanced degree and was working in some technical field. I told him I worked as a dishwasher. It made him sad.
It would make a good double feature with Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss. They both had the protagonist becoming smitten with a neighbor lady while spying on her through her window.
In Atlantic City, Burt Lancaster plays a dapper yet down-and-out aging criminal. He brags about his past ties to historic figures in organized crime. He comes to the aid of Susan Sarandon who wants to work her way up to blackjack dealer at the casino she works at and to eventually make her way to Monte Carlo. She has a couple of mobsters after her.
The movie is listed on The Criterion Channel as a romance. It's sort of like The Way We Were---the couple slowly gets together, they're together and happy for about thirty seconds and they start to drift apart.
We learn that if casino security asks you to leave, shouting at them will make them even less apt to let you stay. The polite hippie girl managed to stay while Susan Sarandon was hustled out of there.
Lancaster was in his late 60's. It was nice to see a relatively old guy in a movie who didn't have any serious medical problems.
...Weinstein, 67, underwent a bilateral laminectomy in December, his rep says — but some experts are skeptical. "It's not even sized appropriately for him," says Kate Miller, a physical therapist with Preferred Healthcare. "It's so high and doesn't support the improvement of gait we should see."
Adds physical therapist Anthony Rojas, "He shouldn't be leaning over his walker — it's not giving him support. The only reason he'd be doing this is if the surgery didn't do enough."
USC's Rob Landel, a professor of clinical physical therapy and director of the residential doctor of physical therapy program, says "from a physical therapy and rehabilitation standpoint, the way he’s moving is not inconsistent with someone who is having severe back pain — especially if they’re having some weakness in the legs...."
My God, I'm an idiot. Bought a cheap DVD of a '70's Italian exploitation film. They made a few nice westerns, but everything else was such crap. I'm not doing that again.
Long ago, there was some syndicated thing they sold to TV stations. It was called "Movie Greats Network". You don't realize how bad a movie can be until you've seen the crap they showed. If you google it, you can see stuff about their business. They showed them on one channel here after network programming ended.
The worst was a shockingly racist South African movie. One character in it was an American hitchhiker who is anti-racist but quickly learns that Blacks are evil.
"But I don't understand," he says. "This isn't their land! Why are they trying to steal it?"
An Afrikaaner explains that Black people are Communists.
It was like Birth of a Nation if Birth of a Nation had a cast of 12.
There was an Italian movie they showed called something like, Young! Violent! Dangerous! A trio of wealthy thirty-year-old Italian teens go on a crime spree. At one point, a detective berates their parents for being inattentive. It ends [SPOILER ALERT] with the young people driving off a bridge in their Fiat.
Those were the only two I managed to sit through. The South African movie was vile enough to hold my attention and I had the idea one of the actors the Italian movie was an American I'd never heard of. (I just found it on imdb.com and I was wrong.) Italian movies back then were all filmed without sound and dubbed. Actors of different nationalities each spoke their own language. In some case, they would just count to ten so their lips would be moving and they could dub in whatever they wanted. So I kept staring at their mouths trying to guess which one was speaking English.
I like the IDEA of cheap foreign exploitation films, but not the horrible reality.
Bunuel's Viridiana: An uncle keeps his niece from becoming a nun.
Long ago, I was working in a kitchen with a young woman who was pregnant. It was going to be a boy, and she had this idea. When he was thirteen, she'd hire a prostitute and tell him that she was going to leave them alone and he could have sex with her if he wanted, it was up to him.
"Do you think that would be wrong?"
"Well, yes," I said.
My impression was that she was only half kidding, But she had a husband who would put a damper on things, she had more than thirteen years to conclude that this might not be such a good idea; I don't think she'd know where to find a prostitute and I doubt many prostitutes would take that gig.
But I'll tell you my theory. I heard a story on NPR. In Latin America, it's common in bourgeois families for the uncles to hire prostitutes to usher their teen nephews into manhood. The boys really, really hate it.
I also saw a Spanish movie where it's up to a household servant to take the high school kid to a brothel. They did something like it in Murmur of the Heart.
My theory is it's a Catholic thing. These bourgeois families do it to make sure their sons don't become priests. Wealthy parents don't want their sons taking vows of poverty and wrecking the family fortune.
(The woman I worked with was Mormon by the way.)
This came to mind when I read that the Pope is considering letting priests marry in Latin America where there's a clergy shortage.
Entry level salaries for Catholic priests in the mid-western United States is just under $30 thousand and they can make up to $44 thousand if they stay in that part of the country. Not bad if you're single.
I sat up watching Lost In Space, the old TV series. It was about twenty minutes of material stretched out over a full hour. The men's costumes were awful. Their butts looked huge and they made no effort to conceal it. I looked on IMDb.com and it said there was a big costume change for the male characters one season, so maybe I wasn't the only one who saw the problem. They needed to add jackets or have them untuck their shirts. Natural fibers wouldn't have hurt anything.
The trouble with the show was that they were all in the same family. There was some violence and they had weapons, but no one was expendable like on Star Trek. Why would anyone take their children out in space? I've only sat through three episodes and the children were in jeopardy in each one.
According to Billy Mumy, he and Jonathan Harris became the focus of the show because they hit their marks and didn't flub their lines. They could do a scene in one or two takes so it sped things up.
So it was nice when they focused on the girl for one episode and had HER menaced by a seemingly friendly alien for a change. Like the time on Little House on the Prairie when they had a pointless episode which focused on the fantasy life of the youngest girl who never did much of anything on the show. She fell down while frolicking in the opening credits and that was only big moment on the show.
I saw one obituary which brought up his split with Mel Brooks. Buck Henry was robbed of credit for creating the show Get Smart. The opening credits said it was "Created by Mel Brooks with Buck Henry". Odd way of putting it.
Buck Henry was the greater talent. Most of Mel Brooks' movies are a series of often bad gags. Buck Henry wrote the scripts to The Graduate and Catch 22. I didn't know he also wrote the scripts to Day of the Dolphin, To Die For and episodes of Quark.
As the great Buck Henry, who died at about the same time Trump delivered
his speech, once said: “We need a president who is fluent in at least
one language.” (Sadly, even the high IQ presidents–Obama, JFK,
Clinton–have proved just as ruthless, and a good deal more cunning, than
the imbecilic Bush and Trump.) Still it’s bracing to contemplate the
possibility that Trump’s drugged-out, incoherent babble this morning may
have knocked off Buck Henry, the screenwriter of Catch-22, in an absurd
kind of collateral damage that both Henry and Joseph Heller might have
appreciated.
We got into a discussion of bad actors. Natalie Portman was bad, but people disagreed with me about the Scientologists, Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Will Smith. There was disagreement about Bette Davis who a couple of us thought was terrible.
I marveled that Brian Kieth, while starring in Family Affair on TV, got third billing after Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor in John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, a weird sex movie. Marlon Brando played a repressed homosexual Army officer who mumbled AND spoke in a phony Southern accent. He's an officer in love with an enlisted man who, it turns out, has been breaking into his house to gaze at his wife (Taylor) as she sleeps. (They had separate bedrooms.) I don't know if Taylor's character was supposed be drugged at night or what. You'd think SOMEONE involved in the production would bring up the possibility that she might have to get up to go to the bathroom at night.
Come to think of it, how did that dangerous weirdo know they had separate bedrooms? In the end (SPOILER ALERT) Marlon Brando shoots him as he comes into his house because he realized he likes Elizabeth Taylor more than him. If they had slept in the same room, he would have been killed the first time he tried it.
Kieth's character had an apparently gay Filipino house boy and his wife is in a mental hospital.
Tom Cruise and John Travolta both do that stupid thing where they act crazy and start yelling things like they're game show hosts. Tom Cruise did this is A Few Good Men and John Travolta did it in The Taking of Pelham 123. Will Smith in Independence Day walked around alone yelling funny things. I assumed this was some idiotic Scientology thing.
Go to the 1:20 mark to see what I'm talking about.
The actress among us thought that Scientologists were good actors because they were able to suspend their own disbelief. Being able to mindlessly believe any nonsense they tell you to say is the key to good acting.
And have you noticed how third rate movie stars often make great TV stars? There was Charlie Sheen, Raymond Burr, George Reeves. I've seen Carroll O'Connor and Ed Asner in early movie roles before they hit it big on TV.
I googled Bette Davis. She said herself she didn't believe in realistic acting. If you want realism, go outside, she reportedly said.
I didn't mention James Dean who never acted like any human being I've ever seen.
I pointed out in another conversation that he wore slacks and a sportcoat to high school in Rebel Without a Cause and was surprised that people defended this as a sign of teen rebellion.
"It was a different time."
He was a rebel because he didn't wear an ascot? I quipped wittily. Yes, I know I used that line on this blog a couple of times. I finally tried it in front of people and amused no one.
Young Adult was listed as a dark comedy directed by Jason Reitman. I was reminded of the advice he got from his father, director Ivan Reitman: Don't try to make scenes funnier or more dramatic. Just follow the script. You picked it for a reason.
I like that advice. I like any advice that tells you not to try very hard.
Charlize Theron plays a ghostwriter for a young adult book series. She returns to her hometown. The series she wrote for is kaput, she seems to be an alcoholic, and she's decided to reunite with her high school boyfriend even though he's married and has a new baby.
With Patton Oswalt as a former classmate who was brutally beaten and left for dead by the jocks in high school.
I don't know if it was an attempt to comfort those of us who didn't move away and become wealthy successes. The small town folk were doing pretty well themselves.
I never squandered money on yearbooks when I was in school, which was wise because I found them posted online anyway. I saw kids I hadn't thought of in years. I googled their names and they all seem to be doing quite well, even the ones I hoped would fail in life. I found only two who were doing really badly. One poor devil had his mugshot online. Another had worked low wage jobs and is now a security guard. They're on opposite sides of the law but neither one is doing well. The security guard looked a lot happier in his picture. Which is nice because he never looked happy in junior high school.
No offense to security guards. The only security guard I knew was on probation for a felony and had just gotten out of a mental hospital when he was hired to patrol outside a local high school. He had a better job than I did at the time.
The movie starts with overly religious Calvinists in Iowa. They seemed cheerful, but if I had grown up there, I probably would have run away to become a pornographic film star myself.
George C Scott stars as a widowed Dutch Reform businessman. His daughter disappears on a church sponsored trip to California. He hires seedy private eye Peter Boyle to find her.
Boyle appears in Iowa. He has an 8mm film he bought in California which George C Scott needs to see. This is where the film's tagline, "Oh my God! That's my daughter!" came from.
"Turn it off! TURN IT OFF!" George C. Scott says, something they referenced years later on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
George C Scott eventually fires Boyle and sets out to find his daughter himself. He descends into the nightmarish world of pornography and prostitution.
The movie may have been vaguely autobiographical. Schrader grew up in the Dutch Reform Church. Then went to California and made movies like this and Auto Focus, about Bob Crane's pioneering work in amateur video pornography.
"I'm with people who love me now!" Schrader might have told his family if they had come to rescue him.
Dick Sargent, the second Darrin on TV's Bewitched, has a major supporting role as George C Scott's brother-in-law.
The movie perpetuates a couple of myths. I think I saw it when I was in high school, probably when it was shown at the university. It was the first time I heard it claimed that undercover cops can't legally deny being cops if you ask them directly. It also presented "snuff films" as a real thing.
Might make a good double feature with Shohei Imamura's 1966 film, The Pornographers. Itwas a bit more upbeat. It's just people trying to make a living at the extreme low end of the movie industry. I'd hate to see some Japanese version of George C. Scott beating information out of them.
Hardcore is kind of a Christmas movie, too. Starts out during the Christmas season. You could really one up those people who watch Die Hard as a Christmas movie.
Both are available on The Criterion Channel.
Auto Focus
I sat and watched Auto Focus last night. I had seen it once several years ago. I thought it was good, but I liked it less this time. About Bob Crane's spiral into depravity which apparently led to his murder in 1978.
I saw him in Disney's Superdad (1973) when I was a kid. I liked it okay, but my taste in film wasn't fully developed. Maybe Superdad would make a better double feature with Hardcore. There was a scene, if I remember correctly, where Bob Crane rescues his daughter from an abstract painter. I liked that scene because the painter waves a gun around. I was 11 and liked movie violence. It turns out to be a squirt gun loaded with paint. Auto Focus reveals that Crane was playing drums in strip clubs for fun at the time, something Disney might have fired him for back then.
Things have changed. In 1995, Disney cheerfully employed writer/director/convicted child molester Victor Salva.
There was some discussion in Auto Focus thata sitcom set in a Nazi prison camp was in incredibly bad taste. My father didn't let us watch it. Producers of the show clearly knew it was a problem. The German main characters were played by Jewish actors, Werner Klemperer, John Banner and Leon Askin. French actor Robert Clary had survived concentration camps as a teenager.
One good thing about Hogan's Heroes was that the General Burkhalter kept threatening to send Colenol Klink to the Russian Front. They more or less acknowledged that the Soviets did most of the fighting in that war.
Auto Focus is also available on The Criterion Channel.
I ushered in the New Year sitting up late watching Diva (France, 1981) again after twenty or thirty years. Based on the novel by Daniel Oldier writing under the name Delacorta. It was part of a short series of novels with Serge Gorodish and his protogee Alba as the continuing characters. This is apparently why the young postman Jules is such a passive character although the story revolves around him. There was the moped chase, but other than that he has to be rescued by other characters.
Jules has a crush on an opera singer who refuses to put out records. He makes a high quality bootleg tape of her performing. Taiwan isn't part of the International Copyright Convention, so a couple of Taiwanese agents are trying to get their hands on the tape and this gets mixed up with a recording made by prostitute revealing the REAL head of the city's heroin and prostitution rackets.
I saw this in the local art theater when it was released in the US in '82. There were certain moments in it that delighted the audience.
There was the scene of Serge talking about the Zen of buttering bread, the scene where Serge opens a garage door revealing he has a Citroen Traction Avant just like the one he sacrificed moments earlier. When a grumpy old man pulls out his War Veteran card in response to a detective showing his police ID.
What bothered me was Jules in a closed subway car with the motor running on his moped.
Watching it alone on streaming video was a different experience, but was it because I saw it before or because I wasn't sitting in a large audience?
