How NOT To Make A Horror Film (Australia, 2016)

They went to a ghost town in the Australian Outback to film a horror movie for $30 thousand Australian which was probably $20,000 American. And that was in the 1990's. Went way over budget for various reasons. Filming in an abandoned, slowly collapsing hotel looked dangerous.

Shows the advantages of digital video. They filmed on Super16 using a camera the guy owned himself, but he hadn't tested it or hadn't tested it enough. The camera and light meter both malfunctioned and most of the footage was a total loss.

It had a crew of twenty which seems huge. For one thing, it cost a lot just to feed them for three weeks.

I'd hate to be responsible for people's safety taking them out to ghost town in the middle of nowhere. Two of the crew were injured in a car wreck which should have killed at least one of them.

The filmmaker talked about how he sank into a depression after the failure. He clung to the film for a couple of years thinking he could still making something of it. He finally went out and made a movie shot-on-video with little money about a naked lady who runs around the outback killing people. They didn't try nearly as hard and the results were better although it still didn't make its money back or lead to bigger things.

And they did finally salvage something from the first attempted film---they made this documentary about its failure.

One thing they talked about was the male lead who turned out to be a terrible person. The director thought it was a failure of casting, that he needed to get people who would be completely devoted to a difficult production. They had to camp out for three weeks. A couple of of years later, the actor started threatening the director by email and telephone.

The documentary isn't very good, really. It's almost all shots of the people speaking to the camera.

The location they filmed their movie in looked great. They filmed in a stone building which had been a hotel. The houses in the town were gone and there were old cars made in the '40's that had been abandoned there for years. I can see why they wanted to film there.

It's possible the horror movie would have turned out great. In that case, the real lessons from this are to make sure the camera works and to bring an extra light meter.

RESTORED version of 1941?

The first "joke" in the movie was a scene where a Japanese sailor is climbing back down the hatch into the submarine which is about to submerge. He looks up and sees a naked young woman swimmer clinging to the periscope above him. He yells "Hollywood! Hollywood!" 

I guess it was a joke. It must have been. I don't know what the joke was or why Spielberg thought it was funny.

I remember going to this thing alone when I was sixteen, sitting in the theater trying to see the humor in it. It LOOKED like a comedy. It was like Donald Trump. Someone pointed out that he speaks with the cadence of a stand-up comedian but he says nothing funny or even clever.

It was before I developed a dislike for Steven Spielberg. I recognized Toshiro Mifune. I took some of it to be a rip off of The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! but cold war paranoia doesn't translate into World War Two which was a real thing. There was some anti-Black racism, although the tank crew was integrated. Other than the submarine crew, the cast was almost all white. There were no Japanese-Americans and the only Zoot Suiter in it was Anglo. 

The movie has been restored for some reason. I watched it for the first time in over forty years on a movie channel that appeared on my Roku without my knowledge or consent. 

With Elisha Cook, Tim Matheson, Treat Williams, Warren Oates, Robert Stack, John Candy, Christopher Lee and the young fellow from I Wanna Hold Your Hand. I don't know who else. I only listed the men. It was almost all male and I didn't recognize the women so maybe I'm as sexist as Spielberg.

I read about it after watching it. One person thought that the movie works better now than it did in 1979 in part because people are more impressed by the non CGI effects. Another said that Spielberg's friends smiled and nodded when he told them he was making the movie, but they were secretly horrified because he wasn't funny.

Enjoy the depression while you can

Soviet apartment. Is that not good enough for you?

In the Soviet Union, everyone got six weeks vacation a year, women retired at 50, men at 55, they worked short hours and when they were at work, they didn't work very hard. They weren't awash in consumer goods, but they had free time. Lots of free time.

We're spiraling into a global economic depression and we may as well enjoy it. It should be our new lifestyle. If we can just get Medicare for All and forget about health insurance, everything will be fine. And it will put a damper on global warming.

People had less under Communism. That was fine because they NEEDED less. They had free healthcare, they were guaranteed housing, rent was set at 10% of income, they were guaranteed a job and they got paid about the same no matter what they worked at.

The one silver lining (reposted)

We might also reflect that, climatically speaking, the best thing that can happen in the short term is a global economic depression. Carbon emissions in the U.S. dropped by 11% between 2007 and 2013, mostly because of the Great Recession. A deeper economic collapse would have an even more positive effect, quite apart from the contributions it would make to the sort of systemic breakdown that would facilitate radical change.

Chris Wright, "Three Cheers for the Decline of the Middle Class", counterpunch.com

A drop in the standard of living is the only thing that will save us. Work less, spend less, take it easy. Enjoy your free time and save the world from annihilation.

Soviet apartment ca 1979.

90 Degrees in the Shade (UK/Czechoslovakia, 1965)

Anne Heywood stars in an Anglo-Czech production (I didn't know there were such things) as an assistant manager in a liquor store who's carrying on an affair with the manager. Trouble begins with a couple of inspectors show up to go over their books and inventory.

Now and then I've heard some ignorant person claim that Communist countries tried to present themselves as utterly free of crime. But most Soviet movies I've seen were essentially crime movies, especially the comedies.

The grim, humorless inspector turns out to be a nice guy who is distressed that people don't like him. He goes home to his alcoholic wife and resentful teen son. I don't know why I found myself rooting for the criminals.

Available on Cohen Media which I get on Amazon Prime.

Legend of Bigfoot (1976)

Not one of the better Bigfoot documentaries. Supposedly filmed over a ten year period, it's mostly a wildlife film by hunter/tracker Ivan Marx who narrates. He talks and talks and talks and speaks like he's talking to a young child. We finally do see shots of some Bigfoots, although even Bigfoot believers regard them as fake. But at least there was a payoff.

Oh, and be sure to watch the closing credits. There's a surprise.

Fake documentaries are so easy to make. Just show a few interviews with eyewitnesses and experts. The more amateurish the more convincing they are. Kind of like a guy I knew from Alabama who was convinced the Pascagoula alien abduction was real because people there were too dumb to have made it up. (He said it, not me.)

They're here.

Remember when Prince Harry dressed as a Nazi for a costume party? The party-goers were supposed to dress like colonialists. Someone pointed out that if Harry wanted to dress like a 19th century British imperialist, he'd just wear a uniform members of the ghastly royal family normally wear at official events. Like a friend I had who had a yellow belt in Judo and wore his Judo outfit to a Halloween party. Look at Harry in the picture above. That's the stupidest-looking uniform I've ever seen.

By the way, Alexander Cockburn thought Harry probably would have been fine going as a Nazi if he had opted to go as a lady Nazi. There were women in the Nazi military, too.

Now "Prince" Harry and his "wife" have moved to Los Angeles. If you ask me, Meghan Markle should have been stripped of her U.S. citizenship when she became the Duchess of Sussex. I don't know what the immigration laws are, but I don't think Harry should allowed permanent residency. There's some question about who's going to pay for their security.

They likely came to the US because they can call legally exploit their "royal" titles here. They can't in England or Canada.

Anyone can use the term "royal" in the United States. I would imagine it's legal to use the title "Prince" or "Princess" or "Duchess" if you want.

I heard on the news long ago about a guy who had never held elective office of any kind who started using the title "Senator". It was perfectly legal and he got great service.

Pretty good reason for Sanders to stay in the race

Boris Johnson has tested positive. We thought Trump might have had it for a while. What happens if Biden gets COVID-19? On the other hand, what happens is Biden and Sanders both get it?

The U.S. has surpassed China and Italy in the number of cases. The U.S. has five times more people than Italy but actually has fewer hospital beds. U.S. hospitals, trying to maximize profits, cut out all the excess capacity.

I think we're in trouble.

Trump is talking about "reopening" the country by Easter, except he hasn't closed anything. He hasn't done anything period. It's state governments that have done this. Trump is apparently planning to take over (blue) state governments.

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)

I watched this movie that wasn't bad. It was Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965). The advantage of watching something like that is that you don't feel the need to pay close attention, so I don't have much to say about it. It LOOKED good, black & white. It was a good quality print that made it look strangely modern, like a spoof of a 1965 movie of that sort.

I looked up the filmmaker. According to IMDb.com, the director had a career than spanned five years. He directed this movie and two documentary shorts and he was an uncredited director of photography on some scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was claimed that he was friends with Stanley Kubrick and that he was the one who first gave him a copy of A Clockwork Orange.

He also produced five movies. It was a short career but it seemed like he did okay. I assume he went on to work in a related field.

I've started saying this a lot. For most people, movie careers don't last very long.

I read an interview with one independent filmmaker who seems to be doing pretty well. He's made several very low budget movies. But he complained that it was all on him. No one is coming to him to help make another. He has to write all his own scripts which he doesn't think is a good thing. He's been able to keep going but not everyone would.

I've noticed people whose brief careers petered out long ago and I wonder why, in this new age of digital video, they don't make another run at it. I don't know what it tells you that once they're out of it, almost nobody decides to try again.

Dementia 13

It gets off to a fast start. It's night. A couple decides to go out in a row boat. The husband is rowing. The wife tells him to take it easy---he's got a bad heart. He suggests that her concern is only because, if he dies before his wealthy mother does, she will inherit nothing. A second after he says this, he clutches his chest.

"Now you've done it!" his wife scolds.

She starts rowing them back to shore.

"If I die, you get nothing!" he warns her seconds before he dies.

She tosses his body overboard, writes a letter to her mother-in-law signing her husband's name and she goes to their estate pretending that he's still alive, as if no one would figure this out if she tried to inherit the family fortune.

And there's a serial ax murderer.

I've seen microphones bobbing around at the top of the picture in movies before, but this movie did it in combination with clear distinct shadow of the boom mic on the actors. Which may have been good because I would have guessed that the sound was dubbed.

It was pretty good. I don't know what the title meant, but that was good, too.

Reportedly, it was shot in the UK the same time as Roger Corman's The Terror and another movie. They had time to shoot one more movie before they returned to Hollywood, so Corman had a little contest---his own Project Greenlight. It was between Francis Ford Coppola and the Israeli Menahem Golan. They each wrote a treatment for a movie and Coppola won.

Dementia 13 is public domain and available on various Roku channels.

Coppola had been the soundman on another Corman movie. Watching the dailies, Corman told them he could hear the camera noise on the soundtrack. It was Coppola's fault, be he talked fast and blamed the cameraman. Corman knew he was lying, but was impressed at how well he could think on his feet.

Prince Charles tests positive

I remember many years ago, it was among the "Letters from the Editors" in National Lampoon. It was signed Prince Charles. It said that they all got a bit of a chuckle when they saw the headline, Queen Begins 30th Year on Throne.

"Mum's always been a bit of a potty hog," Charles explained.

It struck me as funny at the time. Now I'm kind of embarrassed to repeat it here.

The commoner who runs Charles' Twitter account tweeted today, "This isn't the corona-tion one was expecting, to be honest," after the prince tested positive for the coronavirus.

Playwright Terrence McNally has died from it and other celebrities have tested positive for it.

And Harvey Weinstein reportedly has it although it could just be another sob story, like him showing up in court with a walker.

After all the attacks on Sanders...

After all the attacks on Sanders and Warren about how they're going to pay for Medicare For All, the Federal Reserve just handed the short term money markets $1.5 trillion and the Republicans and right-wing Democrats in Congress are about to approve a $2 trillion "stimulus" bill without a second thought. Nobody asked Hillary Clinton how she planned to pay for the war she was planning against Syria.

Project Greenlight: Don't judge too harshly

Francis Ford Coppola's The Bellboy and the Playgirls.

Look at Francis Ford Coppola. His first movies were a couple of nudie films, then he was reportedly among the seven directors on Roger Corman's The Terror and then, when they had some film left over, he directed Dementia 13.

If Coppola had filmed his first feature on Project Greenlight, he would be nothing today.

Instead of one $3 million movie, they should have done twelve $250 thousand movies. Why put all your eggs in one basket?

Project Greenlight

I was inspired to watch old episodes of Project Greenlight after reading the attacks on their last movie, The Leisure Class and its director, Jason Mann. I watched all I could for free on YouTube. If I want to watch it on the Roku I'd have to pay and I'm not doing that.

Although I did pay to see a movie by Mike Carroll. I just read his book on zero-budget filmmaking, so I wanted to see one of his movies. Books seem like a pretty good way to publicize your work. I always thought of it as merchandising----you make a movie with no money and then you write a book about it and that's where you make the money. I thought paying to see that movie might have been a break-through for me and I'd start paying to see lots of movies.

I once watched a long interview with James Garner on YouTube. He talked about The Rockford Files. He said he wanted everyone to direct an episode, so some of the actors on the show as well as Stephen Cannell directed for the first time. Today, an hour-long TV episode costs about $3 million, so they were apparently directing a three million dollar film and it was for a TV series so I assume the consequences would be rather serious if they screwed it up. Garner insisting that everyone direct when they knew nothing about directing gave the impression that directing must not be that hard.

But here they were on Project Greenlight filming a three million dollar movie and really lousing it up in this case.

I'm reminded of the words of Ivan Reitman, what he told his son, whatever his name is. Somebody Reitman. I've written this before on here. His son was about to direct a movie and Ivan told him not to try to make a scene funnier or more dramatic. It's almost impossible to do. Just follow the script---you picked it for a reason. But on the show, they had a script that wasn't ready.

There was a Todd Solondz movie, Life During Wartime, which consisted mostly of scenes of two people talking. Now and then a third person would walk in or there'd be a larger group conversation. That would probably have been a better approach to these Project Greenlight movies. Actors moving around and doing things is more trouble than it's worth, and they love dialog.

Some unrelated stuff

There was a martial arts movie craze back in the '80's, My friends and I would watch these things and back then, we were annoyed if they used editing tricks for the fight scenes. I suppose it was an arbitrary thing, but we wanted to see the guys do their martial arts in single takes, to show that they could really do it.

The worst one was a cheap movie made in Hong Kong. It had the old English guy from Enter the Dragon in it, but it's star apparently couldn't do a fight scene. We'd seem him start to do something martial artsy, then there'd he a cut to him standing in a vaguely karate-like pose over the crumpled body of the person he just did something to. They didn't even try.

But now this editing stuff is the norm. That Irish guy, Mark Cousins, in The Story of Film: An Odyssey, seemed to think the lack of fast cutting in the old kung fu movies was a weakness. He contrasted Enter the Dragon with a more recent martial arts movie from Hong Kong.

Someone somewhere commenting on this, probably on Cracked.com, mentioned someone, probably Matt Damon, in a karate fight in an elevator which would have been impressive if it had been done in one shot. In the publicity for the movie they talked about all the training Matt Damon did for the fight scenes, but why did they bother? It was all in the editing. He didn't need to be able to do anything.

The Soviet movie White Sun of the Desert, a "western" set in Kazakstan in the 1920's, was a huge hit with the public but looked down upon by people in the Soviet movie industry because it only had a couple of fairly easy stunts in it. The action scenes were all done through editing. 

It's a little like the sitcoms like Family Ties. They had a four-year-old join the cast. They'd do whole scenes in medium shot until the four-year-old had a line, then they'd cut to a close-up. It probably didn't matter. The audience knew he wasn't some kind of prodigy who could act out a scene in one shot. In fact. that pre-schooler who can act on Modern Family is a little disturbing to watch.

Like there used to be a TV commercial with a toddler who could talk. It appeared to be her actual mother in the commercial with her. She didn't say very much. Just enough to be impressive but still a little disturbing.

Usually they try to humiliate genuinely precocious child actors. There was a commercial where---well, I don't want to go into it, but a mother says something rather cruel to her preschool son who was pleasantly enthusing to the camera over a brand of air freshener.

And there was poor Mason Reese who had to compare the wide range of items you could make using Underwood Deviled Ham to a Smorgasbord. They had to trick him into saying "Borgasmord". The director convinced him this was actually a word, then, when the said it, we hear people laughing off camera and one of them corrects him and Mason looked embarrassed. 

And watching old B movies from the '30's, they would film scenes in one shot as much as possible to save time and therefore money. Most westerns used real cowhands in lieu of actors had to break scenes up into shots when the actors couldn't handle the stress of more than the briefest exchange of dialog.

Now, on the other hand, I watched a dangerous but unimpressive stunt in a zero budget science fiction movie. Shot on VHS for a couple thousand dollars back in the days before Hi8 or SVHS. A man has to pick a tied-up teenager boy up off the floor (he was SAVING him, not doing something horrible), carried him over his shoulder to a loading dock, sets him down on the concrete floor and loads him into a van. The director realized it was dangerous so he acted as a stunt double for the kid. He said it was extremely disorienting being carried and laid down this way. And it was no picnic for the guy doing the carrying, either, He appeared to be in his 50's and he was obviously in better shape than he appeared but I don't think he should have been lifting a grown man. They couldn't cut away for the couple of brief moments when he might have gotten a hernia or the stunt double might have gotten a skull fracture?

Matt Damon and Good Will Hunting still stink

I don't know if it's surprising that my mother liked Good Will Hunting so much. It was made over twenty years ago. She watched it the other night. I didn't like it back then and I really hate it now. All the main characters were male, they were extremely vulgar which would have been fine if they had been people who happened to say disgusting things, but the movie clearly regarded this as wit. There was the scene where Robin Williams go on at length explaining how he had to think of some reason to not be in awe of Matt Damon's superior intellect. In a courtroom scene, a judge says that he had previously accepted some legal argument Matt Damon had made based on some obscure document, which is absurd.

From Esquire:

Throughout the film, moments of sexual harassment are played for laughs. Will humiliates a series of therapists with homophobic jokes. A gay prostitute character in prison is presented as a punchline. The second scene of the film finds the older Affleck’s affably coarse character, Chuckie, shouting at a woman about sex across a bar. Soon thereafter, Stellan Skarsgård’s foppish and regularly emasculated Professor Gerald Lambeau is found propositioning one of his young female students. It’s a recurring theme. At another point, Minnie Driver’s Skylar gets a silent phone call late at night while studying a Sexual Dysfunction in Neurological Disorders text and asks whether it’s one of her professors calling again.

It turns out that vast swaths of the population has never heard the expression "How do you like them apples" and thought Matt Damon and Ben Affleck made it up for the movie. He shouts at a Harvard Boy, "DO YOU LIKE APPLES? DO YOU LIKE APPLES? I GOT HER NUMBER! HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES!"

But how did Matt Damon know the guy liked apples? I've never liked apples. I remember when I was four years old. Even then I regarded them as a lesser fruit.

I don't think Harvard boys go around trying to impress people by talking about what they learned in class and I don't think they really learn that much. The people who go to Harvard usually admit that the education you get there isn't very good.

Matt Damon's character fit all the criteria of being a Mary Sue, a super intellect with a traumatic past.

Matt Damon himself seems kind of below-average. He's supposed to be a liberal, I guess, but he keeps having to apologize for saying stupid things. There was the Project Greenlight outrage. Here's from an article on Buzzfeed:

Twitter went off on Damon, coining the term #damonsplaining. The actor ended up apologizing with a statement to Variety. He said that the scene was part of a broader discussion and shown out of context, and concluded with “I am sorry that [my comments] offended some people, but, at the very least, I am happy that they started a conversation about diversity in Hollywood.” What’s disappointing about this apology is that it does not reckon with the source of the problem. Damon talked over his coworker, a black woman surely more attuned to the potential fallout of a stereotypical black female character in the script. His vague comments about diversity didn’t really address the paucity of it in Hollywood. Not to mention the arrogance assumed in his presumption that he “started” a conversation about diversity in Hollywood. (Project Greenlight Season 4’s final product, retitled The Leisure Class, has a zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes.)

That article, it goes into other things. I really don't keep up with this stuff so a lot of it is new to me. It might be old news to those reading this.

One thing that really disgusted me was Damon's soliloquy in Saving Private Ryan which he obviously wrote himself. He felt he needed to explain to the audience that Private Ryan felt bad that his brothers were killed so he tells a story that reveals that the world was probably just as well off without them. The story involved one of them hitting a girl over the head a knocking her unconscious. He thought this was charming or amusing.

Asian market

I went to the Asian market yesterday. It's in the university area so there are always wealthy Asian foreign student with Land Rovers and Maserati's parked out front. As I went in, a couple of Asian kids came out wearing surgical masks. It's a small store and their supply of noodles seemed a bit depleted, but I bought a large package of Chinese ramen-like noodles and I got five pounds of sticky rice. All this stuff was sold out at the big grocery store.

I think I should go back for more. I need to hoard more sticky rice.

The first person in this county has died of coronavirus.

At work, we ordered some pizza from a former employee. I was rather impressed. He left this job not knowing what he would do and the next thing we knew he had bought a pizza place. But now he can only sell orders to go and do deliveries. They make a lot of their money selling beer and liquor and from lottery sales, so those things are out. He was looking to buy some large sheets of plywood in case he needed to board the place up.

My own job may be ending this month because of the virus.

Foodstamps, unemployment and savings should keep me going. Perhaps unemployment and staying away from people because of the pandemic will allow me to blossom into a new man, a better human being, but I doubt it.

Young people need to watch more TV

It's Spring Break apparently. I never kept track of that. Isn't it only a week? It always seemed like a lesser vacation to me when I was in school. I think I got dragged off to see relatives on Spring Break which was an outrage. Of course, now, a week off work sounds pretty good. I haven't had a vacation in years.

Florida is trying to crack down on Spring Breakers, shutting down bars, restaurants and beaches and banning gathering of more than ten people to stop the spread of the coronavirus. If you want to go on Spring Break, go to a remote cabin in the woods where you can avoid human contact. Or do what I did and stay home and watch TV.

TV has probably lost a lot of its allure. There's so much more of it now. You can always see something good and you don't have to worry about missing anything. Back in the 1980's, I saw a child crying in a restaurant. His parents dragged him there promising he'd be home in time for The A Team but they ran into friends so the poor boy was stuck there while his parents callously blathered away. Today he'd just watch it later on streaming video.

I had written on this blog long ago about a documentary called Cinemania (2002) about New Yorkers with a pathological need to attend movies, mostly foreign or classic movies. They weren't academics, they had no interest in writing about movies or in making movies. They just had this need to go to them, and they went to several a day. Some had trust funds, some were on unemployment or disability. At least one was autistic and others had OCD. One signed up for a dating service and for a profile just wrote at great length what kind of movies he liked.

It made me feel a lot of better about all the TV I used to watch. It seemed pretty healthy in retrospect.

And, back in the '90's, there was some professor promoting "communitarianism" who wrote a book called Bowling Alone. He felt the decline of bowling leagues and the rise of individual bowling was a sign of social decay.

I didn't read the book but I read a review. The critic argued that people bowled and played bridge with their friends in the '50's out of desperation because they had few entertainment options.

I lived in Boston for a time in the '80's. I was working an office job and found it strange that my-coworkers came to work each morning talking about what they watched on TV the night before. They were in the big city! There was so much to do!

But after a while I calmed down. I'd seen all I wanted to see of the city. I'd still go to the Brattle Street Theater now and then, but I started relaxing and watching TV in the evening. I was much happier and saved a lot of money.

Lyle Waggoner RIP

Just a few days ago, a co-worker was telling me about his daughter who's on a sports team in high school. Her events were cancelled because of the coronavirus, and he started telling me about his years as a teen swimmer. He mentioned different swimming styles such as the butterfly.
 
"That was Mark Spitz' thing," I said.

He said that Mark Spitz was his hero.

The image that came to mind wasn't Mark Spitz but Lyle Wagonner appearing as Mark Spitz on The Carol Burnett Show, wearing an American flag speedo and several Olympic medals. The skit had him on a talk show with Carol Burnett playing Charro.

I was a kid when I saw it and didn't think about it, but imagine appearing on TV that way. He was in awfully good shape.

I never really watched Wonder Woman. He had been up for the role of Batman---it was between him and Adam West. I saw his screen test on YouTube.

Lyle Wagonner has died at 84.

Tried to go shopping

I'd gone shopping for survival food a week or two ago. It made me realize that pretty much all I eat is survival food. But my mother talked to my brother in Seattle and he told her to buy toilet paper! Lots of toilet paper! Him she listens to. So I waited until 10:30 when the stores would have fewer people. All the paper products were long gone as were rice, beans, potatoes and ramen. There was lots of canned soup and some of the less desirable jars of spaghetti sauce. Lots of meat but not in hotdog form. And bread was gone. I got two cans of tomato paste and some Pop Tarts.

I got in line with the cashier who's covered with tattoos. If you say "how are you", he says that he's "blessed".

Prices seem to have gone up. I paid a hundred bucks for what didn't seem like that much. It was two bags of groceries.

A few weeks ago, I would have quipped that I'd be disappointed if I didn't get to self-isolate for fourteen days, but now I'm just worried. How do you avoid a virus like this?

Maybe this little world-wide disaster will make people take global warming more seriously. It's not like other things. When a blizzard hit the UK, newspapers had the good taste to report on it like it was a big disaster but it was really rather pleasant for most people. They got to stay home from work while the kids played outside.

With COVID-19, it's hard to see an upside. Though a British paper did:

The Malthusian power elite of Big Capital used to talk like this only in the privacy of their country clubs. Now they just write it openly. Here’s Jeremy Warner, “business” writer for The Telegraph: “From an entirely disinterested economic perspective, COVID-19 might even prove mildly BENEFICIAL in the long term by disproportionately CULLING elderly dependents”.

That from counterpunch.org.

Maybe streaming video isn't so bad

I wasn't entirely happy with streaming video. What was wrong with DVDs? But it's possible I could be quarantined or have to self-isolate before this thing is over, so now it seems pretty good. If they aren't closing movie theaters they should.

There was an article on RT worrying what this will do to working class and middle class workers in the movie industry. No one cares about the suffering of Tom Cruise, obviously, but what about everybody else? Streaming video was already reportedly harming people in television who don't get residuals for views online.

The trouble with DVD's is that there are a lot of movies you don't want to watch more than once.

The strange thing to me is the zero-budget filmmakers. Usually, their movies were available only on DVD, but they were charging a fortune for them, maybe thirty bucks each. And you're buying the thing sight unseen with few if any reviews. Maybe they knew what they were doing---maybe they were maximizing profits. But if they had been selling them for five or ten dollar each, I'd have bought them. Lots of them. I heard that one was charging $90 per DVD.

I don't know what all the other costs are, but I've seen companies that will produce 100 DVD's, packaged and shrink wrapped, for $1.85 each. Less if you order five hundred or a thousand.

Nollywood sells DVDs for a few dollars each and they're making a fortune.

Weinstein sentenced to 23 years

I don't know how I missed the news. I've been focusing on the pandemic, I guess. But I was pleasantly surprised to see Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years. I don't know how long he'll actually be in prison but he'll be ninety in twenty-three years.

The statement he made before sentencing is below. Maybe his delivery was really good because there's nothing there that makes him sound the least bit remorseful or sympathetic. Maybe he figured it was hopeless so why embarrass himself.

Convicts love mail. This would be a good chance to correspond with a former Hollywood bigshot. Search online to learn the dangers of contacting a sex offender in prison.

The full transcript of Weinstein’s remarks:

First of all, to all the women who testified, we may have different truths, but I have great remorse for all of you. I have great remorse for all the men and women going through this crisis right now in our country. You know, the movement started basically with me, and I think what happened, you know, I was the first example, and now there are thousands of men who are being accused and a regeneration of things that I think none of us understood. 

I think that — I can’t help looking at Jessica and Mimi and hope that something of our old friendship in me could emerge, but I’m sure like me, they have lawyers who say to them be careful of what you say. I read, you know, those letters where people talked about, you know, missing you, loving you, that kind of thing. As you know, having a serious friendship, that is what I believe that I had with Mimi and Jessica. 

You know, I really, really was maybe hypnotic and under that impression that I had that feeling, that I had that relationship. That five years with Jessica and the years that I knew Mimi were always filled with, ‘Don’t go on the plane Harv, I want to have dinner with you first,’ from Mimi. 

Or ‘Harv, whatever, let’s get, you know, can you look at this idea I have for a television series.’ 

Or ‘Harv, I’m in Cannes, can I go to the premiere.’ Or Jessica, ‘Can I get into the Soho Club,’ which is a very exclusive tough place to get into. But she needed it for herself. I got her a job at the Peninsula Hotel which she excelled at for a while. I’m not going to say these aren’t great people. I had wonderful times with these people, you know. 

It is just I’m totally confused and I think men are confused about all of these issues. You know, I just — dealing with the thousands of men and women who are losing due process, I’m worried about this country in a sense too. 

I’m worried there is a repeat of the blacklist there was in the 1950’s when lots of men like myself, Dalton Trumbo, one of the great examples, did not work, went to jail because people thought they were communists. You know, there was a scare, and that is what happened, and I think that is what is happening now all over this country. 

Two years ago we wrote a letter to 15 friends, I think, the ADA quoted part of it, but the part of it that was the most important part was ‘I’m a builder.’ I know how to build, and I know how to generate, you know, things on a charitable nature, and I know how to pass my success forward. I think even Mimi and Jessica would say that I was generous, you know, in that part of the relationship. The thing that I wanted to do in that letter was I wanted to build a hospital, but not a hospital like the regular hospital, a hospital that deals with this, rehabilitation and redemption. 

People losing their jobs over the fact they testified for me, or people being afraid to testify that they will lose their jobs. That is not the right atmosphere for this United States of America. It is wrong, you know, and that is what is happening. Everybody is on some sort of black list. 

I had no great powers in this industry. Miramax at the height of its fame was a smaller company than by far any Walt Disney, any Sony, Paramount. I could not blackball anybody, because if I said don’t use that actress, the guys at Warner Brothers would say I’m going to use it to spite that bastard, whatever. 

That is what it was. But it became blown up like power, power, power. I was not about power, I was about making great movies. I was a perfectionist, and I think I drove myself crazy. 

I’m not going to also run away from what the District Attorney said about some of the things I did say. I had a fight with my brother, yes, people said I said bad things to people, but there are so many people, thousands of people who would say great things about me. 

Sixty executives in this industry were trained by me. They are at the top of their field. They were running studios in top positions in this country. When I was an assistant at Paramount, they said if you are five minutes late, don’t come in, or they would black me the whole day. There never was in our industry a book that said, ‘This is how it should be.’ We always passed it on from assistant to assistant. An assistant was almost like if you were my assistant, it was like going to the Marine Corps, I mean could you survive two years with me and then become an executive. And those two years were tough, and I admit it. If I had to do it over again, I would not do it that way. 

If I had to do a lot of things over, I would care less about the movies and care more about my children, family, and other people and friends and other people in this life. 

The thing for me is I have not seen my three older children since the newspaper, since the New Yorker article came out; not the New York Times, but the New Yorker article, so I have not seen them. I just have no idea what they are doing, and I’m in no communication with them. That for me is hell on earth. 

I just think my empathy has grown over the last two and a half years. I can look at everybody there, you know, and just say, you know, I understand things. I empathize. I feel things. And I was not that person until this crisis started. I have to just say that. I mean that part of this is such a tough process and has come out where I have learned so many things. I never thought I could deal with or things I dealt with in Arizona. 

I said I’ll build this hospital blah, blah, blah. I said to two 15-year-olds, ‘What would you name the hospital?’ They said the Wonder Woman Hospital. I said you have to think of like a Greek God. He said Athena. Those two 15-year-olds, because they were all part of this group, were hooked on opiates and whatever, and you know, prostituting themselves to make money for it. I met all sorts of people and I have grown. 

For me, the idea of perfection in art and business is over. My mission is to help people.

And I also want to make one clear statement. My wife Eve, my first wife and my wife Georgina knew nothing about this. I went to extraordinary lengths to hide my extramarital affairs. That was a terrible thing that I did by having those extramarital affairs, and God knows if I could take it back, I would. I know everybody in this room feels the same way. It had nothing to do with anything. I was unfaithful to both, and I just cannot tell you how bad I feel about that. 

You know, I never see my children again and they are everything to me in this world. 

You know, when I deal with subjects like this, I don’t wish for vengeance. I wish for understanding. That is why I wanted to build a hospital. I wanted to build a hospital where if somebody is accused of something, they work, women, men, me too, they work with accredited groups that come in and help them and help them grow.
You know, I wanted to testify, but they told me all these things the District Attorney just said would come in my way before I testified. I wanted to talk to everybody, but anyhow, they all came up as it is. 

Now you should know some of the other side of that because I recognized the voices in those.

One of those voices, one — I lost my train of thought. I just recognized some of the names who complained, but what was known about me was with the toughness came the kindness. The person who probably hates me the most in this world, their daughter has a situation where she needs the help of a great doctor, I got her that doctor. That doctor is there to date with her. Her father could not get that doctor. This is the person who hates me the most in this company. When his mother was sick I helped him with a doctor too. There was not any request that I refused on the part of the people who worked with me. 

As far as the million dollars is concerned, I wrote a check out from the company, but I reimbursed the company because that is the way we did it. That million dollars was mine and I will say that over and over again. 

9-11 happened, and I woke up two days later, I called (VH1 President) John Sykes, I said we have to do something for New York, not only for the money, but for the attitude. We raised a hundred million dollars free of expenses. Ask the police who got that money. Ask the firemen if they respect me. Ask the workers if they respect me, and most of all, ask the victims of 9-11 who received $35 million of that $100 million if they respect me. 

You know, when you want to investigate, take both sides into the equation, then when Sandy happened and people lost their jobs, and people lost their houses, again, we went to the board and we raised $77 million. Ask the guy in Coney Island. Ask the guy in Far Rockaway when he lost his business and we were able to walk in there and save his business. Ask him if he likes me. Ask the captain who was killed in action. I took his children to the Super Bowl and to the Academy Awards because somebody had to do it. I did it with Steve Tisch. There are so many examples of that.
Robin Hood raised two and a half billion dollars for the children and people of New York City.

We built schools, built advocacy groups. I’m not saying I was a great part of it, but I was one of the board there and 22 years, and I had a lot to say and a lot to do. (Paul Tudor) Jones was the one who deserved the credit, but two and a half billion dollars to build schools. I showed it by my work. 

You can’t achieve what we achieved at AmFar. You cannot achieve what we achieved at AmFar without doing the hard work, getting the people, and we raised $170 million and I started with AmFar. People would not touch each other, like the virus today, people would not touch each other. They were scared of AIDS and there were three hundred people who raised three hundred thousand dollars the first night. 

The year I left AmFar we raised $30 million and $170 million overall. 

I worked too hard. As a result of working too hard, I felt too much pressure on myself. 

I really feel the remorse of this situation, I feel it deeply in my heart. I feel emotional, I feel like to go and talk to you guys, you know, just really, really caring and really trying and really trying to be a better person. 

Thank you, your Honor, for the time.

Virus-related movies on Netflix

I see a couple of movies are popular on Netflix.

There's Outbreak. "If the virus spreads, billions worldwide will die. Now one small town may pay the price for mankind's very survival." Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Cuba Gooding, Jr.

And Pandemic, which would appear to be a documentary about someone preparing to fight future epidemics like the Spanish Influenza that killed fifty to a hundred million people during World War One.

Come to think of it, I went to see Gone with the Wind in a theater back in the '70's, long before it was shown on TV and released in video. There was a bit of a chuckle in the audience when Scarlet O'Hara's first husband, Millie Hamilton's brother, died in the war of disease rather than being killed in combat. Or maybe I was the only one who saw it as a comment on how ineffectual the character was. I was only about twelve at the time. Don't judge me.

Another "trending" movie is Containment. "They have nothing to fear except fear itself. Oh, and that horrific virus that's killing everyone in Atlanta."

If you want to get into less "realistic" movies, you might look for The Andromeda Strain, The Stand, or The Last Man on Earth.

With camcorders everywhere, filmmakers might quickly make some zero budget movies. Use titles like Quarantine, Islolation, Self-Quarantine, or Incubation. You could only use a couple of actors and film it entirely in your house. Act fast.

There was a zero budget movie called A Simple Game of Catch. A young woman has graduated from college and moved to New York. Unable to find a real job, she becomes a pet sitter for a parrot. Stuck in an apartment, she watches TV, she googles and calls a bewildered classmate from grade school. She's so lonely she nearly buys a sofa on Craigslist. 52 minutes.

James Dean movie apparently called off

James Dean with a dog and a cigarette.

Remember when a South African was going to make a movie about a dog in the Vietnam War and he was going to have a computer generated James Dean in a supporting role? IMDb.com listed the movie as one of James Dean's acting credits in pre-production. I just checked. It's no longer there. I hope this means it's been called off.

It seemed idiotic but maybe it was a good gimmick. 

It would probably make more sense to have a computer generated dog instead of a CGI James Dean. They could claim they brought Lassie back from the grave, or back from the taxidermist, whatever was done with the poor dog's remains.

I don't know how many people today know who Lassie was. They could say they brought back Tiger from The Brady Bunch.

Max Von Sydow RIP

The great Max Von Sydow, who died this week at age 90: “I wish I could have a wider choice of roles in American productions, the kind of roles I get in Europe. Unfortunately, American film producers only offer you exact copies of roles you successfully performed before.”

I don't know what the first movie was that I saw him in. Either Three Days of the Condor on HBO when I was thirteen or The Seventh Seal on public television which was showing movies from the Criterion Collection every day at one PM. I'd watch them each day over the summer, but I don't remember when I started that. I remember thinking that his crew cut was a more plausible medieval hairstyle than the hippie-length hair they had in most movies in the '70's that were set in that era.

But how old was I when I saw the Exorcist? I remember lying in my bunk bed. It was kind of a flimsy metal bed bought at a garage sale somewhere. And it was shaking slightly which made me think of Linda Blair on her demon-possessed bed. I lay there motionless so Satan would think I was asleep. I finally got up. The cat was on the top bunk cleaning herself and that was enough to make the bed shake ever so slightly.

Unless I was an even dumber teenager than I remember, that had to have been when I was a preteen, but I couldn't have seen that movie at that stage without being traumatized. Maybe I just saw something about the making of The Exorcist.

Max Von Sydow died on March 8th at age 90.

Biden's going to louse it up

As far as the election goes, I don't know if it makes any difference whether Biden has senile dementia or a stuttering problem as his campaign is claiming. Trump's already pouncing on it.

And I don't believe any of that crap about Russian interference. Trump effortlessly crushed one Republican candidate after another in the primaries and no one claims he had any help.

Some people in Biden's campaign have reportedly said that he starts babbling like an idiot when he gets tired, toward the end of the day. Maybe they can make sure he's well-rested for the debates. And one thing I saw on Cracked.com was that the real reason candidates debate standing up is so they could use game show sets. Look at the Kennedy-Nixon debates. They were sitting comfortably. With two elderly candidates, it might not be a bad idea to use more of a Dick Cavett Show format.

If Biden wins, corporate Democrats will claim it's proof that only they can win. If he loses, they'll blame Sanders. It won't make any difference to them. Some of them have stated openly that they'd rather have Trump than Sanders. They have no problem with Trump ideologically. They'd rather stop Sanders than stop Trump.

Is Hillary Clinton a Communist?

I walked through the living room. That Hillary Clinton thing on Hulu was on. I walked through just in time to hear her say that nobody likes Bernie Sanders.

Later, I was sitting in the next room and listened to her claim that the elections in Russia were all rigged.

The biggest political party in Russia is Russia United, Putin's party. The second biggest is the Communist Party. Was Clinton claiming that the Communists really won the election?

It's okay with me if she was. But I don't think she was.

Spielberg's daughter going into porn

Steven Spielberg's daughter is going into pornography. She has a fiance she was recently arrested for assaulting so out of some confused sense of sexual morality she'll only do "solo" videos for the time being. She's also trying to get some sort of license to become a stripper.

Well, good for her, I guess. At least she's not acting under financial duress.

It seems like she could become a regular actress if she wanted. If you were a low budget director, you would cast Spielberg's daughter in a second. It would guaranteed that Steven Spielberg would watch your movie. It could be your big break.

Several years ago, Dick Smothers, Jr, went into pornography. His father supported him but wanted him to use a different name (although it is a pretty good porn name). He said that his son had been struggling to succeed in show business for years and that this was his last chance. He wasn't getting any younger and if he was going to become a porn star, he had to be quick about it.

Is it really that easy to become a porn star? You can just publicly announce that you're a porn star now and assume you'll be hired to star in pornographic movies based on your famous name? How do real porno stars feel about this, people who've had claw their way out of the gutter and up the ladder of success?

You know the last shot of The 400 Blows when Jean-Pierre Leaud looks directly into the camera? They could do this with Miss Spielberg's porno films. The final shot could be of her looking straight into the camera and saying, "I HATE YOU, DADDY!"

Three Men to Kill (France, 1980)

Alain Delon wasn't nearly as cool as he might have seemed in 1980.

Delon plays a rich French guy comes across a one-car accident on a country road at night and takes a seriously injured man to the hospital. Turns out he had been shot. Now Delon has hitmen after him.

In Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Warren Oates mentions early on that he used to shoot guns a lot. That brief comment is all that prepares us for what he does the rest of the movie. In this, you wait to hear about something in Delon's character's background, but there's nothing. There are car chases, gun fights, murders.

Kind of a crappy Three Days of the Condor.

Considering that people in high places are sending hit men out to commit murders and then more hit men to kill all the witnesses, the movie make France seem like less of a hellhole than other French movies. There wasn't any police torture, for example.

I'll give away the ending here. Delon walks in unarmed and helpless to talk to the wealthy military contractor who's been trying to have him murdered, as if he would have the slightest idea what to say to him. Then the guy gets so mad at Delon that he abruptly dies of natural causes.

I watched it on Amazon where it's on the Cohen Media Channel.

Polanski, Huston, the Tenant and stuff

Roman Polanski didn't seem worth thinking about. He's in France, they aren't going to extradite him and there's nothing anybody can do about it. I think it's weird how many people wanted him to come back to the United States. We're getting along fine without him.

But now the French have turned on him.

You know, long ago, my sister told me she hated John Huston. She claimed that she read an interview where he said he was just like the guy he played in Chinatown. It wasn't true. Huston has said that he didn't especially like himself as an actor and that his performance in Chinatown was the only one he was really pleased with. I don't know how my sister managed to twist that the way she did.

But now I wonder about Polanski and the horrible little man he played in the movie. Was this is true personality?

Or maybe he was like the guy in The Tenant.

The time I went to see The Tenant

I was in high school. It was Friday or Saturday night so I walked over to the university to see what movies were playing. I decided to see The Pawnbroker. I read a description of it and thought, okay, so I walked over there.

There were four different classrooms where they showed movies on weekends. I walked to the wrong one and went to The Tenant instead. It had a one noun title so I didn't realize I had made a mistake.

"Which one is the Holocaust survivor?" I kept wondering.

I didn't know who Polanski was, but I thought he was too young to have been one, although he actually was.

I sat there struggling through half the movie trying to reconcile what I saw on the screen with what I read on the poster for a different movie. Finally, I gave up and relaxed and watched uncritically and found it really creepy.

Years later, I recommended it to someone else. They rented it and watched and told me later that they were cursing me the whole time because they didn't care for it.

I should have paid closer attention and maybe watched it a couple of times before offering an opinion, but that was in the days before home video, so you could only see it once and come to snap judgement.

Oh, and I recommended it to another person who didn't remember what I said. I recommended The Tenant and the French movie Forbidden Games, and she mixed the two up and rented Polanski's Diary of Forbidden Dreams and wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

Still can't see Call Me By Your Name for free

I still haven't seen Call Me By Your Name. The thing's a couple of years old but it's still not free on streaming video. I'm not going to pay for it.

A.S. Hamrah wrote:

Call Me by Your Name’s strength is that it really does seem like the character played by Timothée Chalamet made the film himself. Who else but an actual actor-director would end his film by staring tearfully into a fireplace in winter because he’s realized he will always be separate from other human beings, even though he spent last summer having sex in Lombardy with two kind and very attractive people (Armie Hammer and Esther Garrel)? 

I don't know. I saw that movie made in Australia or someplace about two middle aged bourgeois women who start having sex with each other's good-looking athletic college-boy son. It was called Adore. The women were both thin and attractive. I just can't imagine people like that having any emotional depth. The women could have slept with their own sons and it wouldn't have left the slightest emotional scar. The movie wasn't depraved enough. It should have been about hillbillies. Same as with this Chalamet movie.

Alex Cox's Repo Chick

I bought a DVD of it and it was pretty good. Filmed entirely in front of a green screen. I had seen the trailer for it and the brief shots of the green screen effects didn't look terribly good. I read someone attack it by falsely claiming they had used stock photos as backdrops to the scenes. In fact, they used a lot of models. They bought a lot of model railroad supplies to construct the miniatures they used in the chroma key shots.

It was like when I was in preschool. They wheeled in a TV and turned on Mr Rogers Neighborhood. It started with a shot of a model of the neighborhood with little toy cars parked on the streets. I wanted to see more of that, but they cut to Mr Rogers singing and changing his shoes.

It was like the Japanese movie I Attacked Pearl Harbor which re-enacted World War Two battles using Godzilla-like special effects.

Alex Cox had planned to make Repo Chick, a non-sequel to Repo Man, for six to eight million dollars. When he couldn't raise the money, he did it this was for around $100,000. The filming went extremely fast. The DVD had a doc about the making of the movie and they said they could film 20 pages of script in a day.



I had some thought about doing something in front of a green screen. It would have been far cruder, of course. I thought this movie would give me some confidence in the idea, and it did to some degree, but I could never do all that stuff.

"Prince" Harry, murderous dullard

With Prince Harry and his bride in the news moving to Canada, here's something from an article in Vice in 2013:

The media has spoken to Prince Harry, and it doesn’t make for particularly comfortable reading. The main revelation is that he’s killed a number of people in Afghanistan, which is a little more visceral than pictures of Kate walking Lupo the cocker spaniel in the manicured grounds of Kensington Palace. Harry calls his victims Taliban fighters, but since he’s doing the killing from the safety of an Apache helicopter, you have to wonder if he knows whether he’s killed anyone at all, let alone whether he’s killed people he’s meant to be fighting against.

...

The fact that he is an actual killer hasn't been glossed over by the press, but it does seem to have been underplayed. They seem to have equated destroying the lives and homes of non-specific bearded humans as the equivalent of Prince Charles butchering pigs on his organic farm. Harry says he “takes a life to save a life” and goes on to say that if “there's people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we'll take them out of the game, I suppose”. He is allowed to sit, smirking casually, as he uses Old Testament language to describe the killing of Muslims thousands of miles away from the UK, while David Cameron talks about generational war and a new front in the war on terrorism opening up in North Africa. To Captain Wales, killing isn’t real, so he needn’t take it too seriously. And anyway, if a trip to North Africa is on the cards, count him in – there’s some bloody great whore houses in Tangier after all.

Wales isn’t the only soldier to distance himself from the reality of killing, but he may be the only one who's done it that casually in an internationally syndicated interview. The self-styled jock of war lets the world know that he’s really good at his day job (killing people) because he’s really good at playing computer games. "It's a joy for me because I'm one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think that I'm probably quite useful," he says flippantly, as he describes slaughtering people with his Apache helicopter.

...

And imagine, if you will, being one of those guys he takes out. Taliban fighter or innocent goat herder, you’d look up, see a glint of ginger in the helicopter wheeling way above you and think 'FFS, bombed out of existence by the roguish rugger bugger from Eton' as the missiles came to engulf you in flames. No one wants to be another notch on Wales’s apparently well-notched kill post. Yet many are, it seems, and Harry – full of soldierly bravado – continues to try and convince us that he’s Prince Hal and the Black Prince rolled into one. He’s trying to take it back to the muddy green fields, when royals led the line and the enemy was French.

If it’s not Prince Hal he’s evoking, then – as Jonathan Jones suggests in The Guardian – it’s Tom Cruise. Jones drools over a picture of Harry running to his helicopter ("acting out chivalrous fantasies") and gets a little hysterical about how sexy and warlike he is. The headline tells us Harry is “more Top Gun than Wilfred Owen” and of course that’s true because, as he freely admits, the Prince barely read at school and, as we can ascertain, he’s almost certainly a massive idiot.