What Richard Did, Ireland (2012)

Thank God I wasn't a popular athlete in high school, especially in Ireland. I don't think I could handle all the hugging.

18-year-old Richard is a popular bourgeois alpha dog athlete of some kind. He and his friends have a party out at his parents' beachhouse. They take along a younger fellow. They're nice to each other. They're perfectly pleasant the way some school athletes are, trying to live up to the position they hold in school.

Richard is at a drunken party. He gets into a fight with his drunken friend then they walk off. The next day, he learns that his friend died. He apparently killed him.

I knew this was going to happen because it was in the description, but it didn't happen until 40 minutes in.

Will guilt stricken Richard admit what happened? Will he lay low and hope the cops don't take him away? Will he start peeling off the witnesses one by one?

Based on the novel Bad Day at Blackrock based on an actual murder in an Irish nightclub in 2000.

According to the internet, the minimum sentence for manslaughter in Ireland is a fine. The maximum sentence is life in prison. If you're sentenced to life in prison there, your case will usually be reviewed in seven years.

Available on Amazon Prime.

The Big Country (1958)

Watching westerns, I usually think about what I would do if I had to live there. How I would scrape together money for train fare to get back east. But, of course, there was an economic depression from the 1870's to the early 1890's, the cities were full of disease and poverty and you'd have to work in a factory or a slaughterhouse; if you lived on the coast you could get Shanghai'd. That's probably what drove people west.

The Big Country (1958), directed by William Wyler, starring Gregory Peck, Burl Ives and Charles Bickford among others was a two hour forty-five minute epic. Gregory Peck arrives in a tiny desert town. The children laugh at his suit and his tiny hat. His fiancee arrives to take him home to her father's giant ranch. On their way, they're attacked by local ruffians, Chuck Conners among them. They don't shoot at his feet and make him dance, but they take his hat and lasso him.



Gregory Peck doesn't think it was a big deal. He went through worse at his college fraternity and his shipmates had fun keelhauling him in the Navy.

Gregory Peck is tougher than anyone else but he doesn't want them to know it. Charlton Heston and the other cowhands try to initiate him by getting him to ride a bucking bronco. He refuses, then breaks in the horse later when the men are gone.

As an actor, Burl Ives was like Ernest Borgnine or Andy Griffith. I always thought he was folksy and grandfatherly, but he was really good at playing the heavy.

Weird that Ives got into the movies by way of folk singing.

In this case, Gregory Peck's future in-laws are in a violent feud with Burl Ives and his kin, ostensibly over water.

The movie was long but not boring. But that may have been because of the caffeine I took before watching it. The desert looked better than it does in most of these movies.

Available on Amazon Prime.

How to succeed in our grim new nightmare world

I had that one drawn out experience long ago. I got an email from my cousin who I think had sent the same email to everyone he knew. He had a friend who was doing a made-for-YouTube zombie video. Okay, I'd help. I went over there. Of the people there, I was the only with a job and, it turned out, the only one who owned a video camera of any kind. They were broke and clutching at straws hoping to get some YouTube money rolling in.

The video never got made. The auteur behind it had the idea that he should draw everything out as long as possible so that people would drop out and he'd finally be left with a dedicated core group. He actually said that. Because you need total dedication to make a two minute amateur video.

But this sort of thing, turning to the movie business out of financial desperation, isn't that unusual.

Kyoko Kagawa said in an interview that a lot of Japanese movie stars just after World War Two had gone into acting because it was the only job they could find. How many child actors worked to support their families in the only profession open to them? Jimmy Lydon, the teen actor who played Henry Aldrich in the 1940's, started acting because his alcoholic father abruptly decided to quit working.

Something to think about as the world spirals into global depression.

George Carlin decided to quit comedy and go into acting. He was going to go to Hollywood but first had to pay off his debts, so he performed as many stand-up gigs as he could find and inadvertently became a comedic powerhouse.

I wonder if you get better results doing it for the money than you would acting out of some deep-seated neurotic need. The Criterion Channel is showing the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis but not Ed Wood, Jr.

It could be the Taoist principle of Wu Wei in action. Wu Wei is "not doing". Passive achievement. I heard that this was a western misunderstanding of the term, but it's the idea that you can do a lot better if you don't try so hard. You can perhaps produce greater art if you're not trying to produce art at all and to just make money. And you might make more money, too.

Jimmy Lydon will be 97 next month.

I guess this thing isn't helping

From The Onion:

NEW HAVEN, CT—Admitting that a highly contagious, deadly pandemic had done little to stoke his creativity, local man Michael Ayers confided to reporters Wednesday that he wasn’t sure why he had imagined the most stressful situation he had ever experienced would be the thing that finally made him more productive. “Despite my high hopes, the most devastating crisis of my life hasn’t turned out to be the catalyst I needed to meet all of my long-held personal goals,” said Ayers, who added that he had no idea what he was thinking when he told himself that being furloughed from his job and enduring a sustained period of emotional isolation would be just what he needed to start eating better, acquaint himself with world cinema, and get a jumpstart on the novel he had always wanted write. “For some reason I took a look at an economic catastrophe that may soon rival the Great Depression and said, ‘Oh great, now I’ll have the energy and the space I need to focus on my creative side.’ But I guess living with ever-present, crushing uncertainty and the knowledge that people all around me are dying wasn’t the stimulus I needed after all.” At press time, Ayers had reportedly decided that, going forward, he would instead focus all his time and attention on feeling guilty about his lack of productivity.

Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary (1985)

I don't know when Jean-Luc Godard started filming everything static camera, but it's been at least 35 years. It works pretty well most of the time.

Hail Mary is the story of the Virgin Mary set in what was then present-day France. It didn't have much to say about it. It was condemned by the Catholic Church, by the Pope himself, because the Holy Virgin kept taking her clothes off.

I had rented the movie on VHS in the '80's. In those days, the box had the word BANNED blazoned across the cover. The film student working the counter said he wanted to see it and asked me to tell him what I thought of it, but I never did and he didn't ask again.

I should have read the box because I didn't even know what I was seeing. It turned out that the first part was a short film ("The Book of Mary") by Anne-Marie Mieville who worked in the same manner as Godard. It was all static camera except for one shot. It was about an 11-year-old girl named Mary whose parents are splitting up. I assume this was upsetting to the girl, but it didn't make that clear.

Then it got into Godard's film.

Mary works in a gas station owned by her father and has a boyfriend named Joseph but she's saving herself for marriage. She plays basketball at school. Joseph is a cab driver who brings a man and girl to the gas station. They tell Mary that she's going to get pregnant even though she's never known the touch of a man.

Mary's OB/GYN confirms that she's both pregnant and a virgin.

Joseph is rather distressed. Mary keeps taking her clothes off.

Roger Ebert didn't think the movie was very good but didn't think it was blasphemous.

Christ figures in film are a dime a dozen. I think Jerry Lewis might have qualified in at least one movie. I assume there are Madonna figures, too. The only one I can think of off hand is in an episode of The Rifleman where Mark is delirious with typhoid and keeps having visions of his late mother.

So what was this supposed to be? Was it a straight re-enactment of the New Testament story in modern dress? Was it an alternate universe where Christianity was the one true religion but Christ wasn't born until the 1980's? Or was it just some girl who happened to be named Mary with a boyfriend named Joseph who finds herself a pregnant virgin and everyone's too polite to point out the obvious parallels?

Available on streaming video from Cohen Media.

Mayor of Las Vegas wants to open the place

They didn't put this in the movie, but in the novel Jaws the mayor insists on keeping the beaches open because he's being threatened by the Mafia which had money invested there.

Which might cast a different light on the mayor of Las Vegas wanting to open the casinos now and pack in the tourists.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

My mother wanted us to watch a movie together. I searched and searched for one that neither of us would find objectionable. There were a couple of Tom Cruise movies she liked, but no way was I going to watch those.

Finally settled on The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. She didn't understand it. I told her there wasn't really anything to understand. I pointed out that they kept getting together to eat and never got to eat. She thought it was funny when the priest killed a man.

The scene where the bishop asks the couple to let him work for them as a gardener made me think of Bunuel's Nazarin. Father Nazario triggered a violent labor dispute when he offers to work without pay, for meals alone. We hear gunshots as he and his disciples walk away.

In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the bishop wisely says he'll work for union scale, no more, no less. "I have to follow the rules."

Roger Corman's Quarantine Film Festival

Roger Corman wants you to make a two minute movie without breaking quarantine

The rules:

You have to stay home and stay safe and film the video inside your house or in the backyard.
The short must be filmed on a cell phone.
It must be under 2 minutes.

https://nofilmschool.com/roger-corman-quarantine-film-fest 

That was posted the 16th and it says you have two weeks to get it done.

Fortunately, I don't have a cell phone. So I can relax. But YOU should do it.

Lady in a Cage (1964), coronavirus

There was a party next door. College students. They were outside and I could have gone out and looked to see if it was just the people who lived there or if they had guests, but I didn't bother.

Here I am, a prisoner in my own home. I can only be freed when the coronavirus goes away and they're keeping it alive, spreading it among themselves.

I'm like Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage. A wealthy disabled woman has a cage-like elevator in her home. She's alone for the weekend and starts to take the elevator down to the living room. It breaks down halfway. She's stuck in there. Then a bunch of beatniks and juvenile delinquents invade her home and she has to watch helplessly as they drink her liquor and wreck the place.

The analogy isn't perfect, of course.

Tom Lester RIP

Tom Lester best known for playing Eb on Green Acres, has died of complications from Parkenson's Disease at age 81.

It took me a while to warm up to Green Acres. I like the show now. One evening I was hanging around with family and friends. I told them about a gag from the show.

Eb had a list of demands for the youth of Hooterville. One was that they have Friday night drag racing. He briefly explained that they'd dress up like women and run foot races.

I didn't think that much about it, but the others were very surprised and thought the show was ahead of its time and had slipped something past the censors. And, really, you wouldn't have heard anything like that on Mayberry RFD.

Tom Lester was the last surviving member of the show's regular cast.

Charles Manson documentary

I never cared if Charles Manson lived or died. He wasn't going anywhere. It was kind of nice when he did die and you knew there'd be no more interviews.

But I just watched some of a documentary which took the view that Manson was a misunderstood visionary. A misunderstood visionary with a swastika etched into his forehead.

The swastika was backwards. Someone thought it meant that it was a Hindu symbol for good luck rather than a Nazi swastika, but I think that just meant he did it while looking in a mirror.

I turned it off after a few minutes. The movie showed some long clips of an interview Manson did years ago. His schtick hadn't changed a bit since 1971. I'm now truly glad he's dead.

Years ago, I watched the made-for-TV movie Helter Skelter. I was thirteen and a devout atheist, but I still found predictions of Armageddon frightening. I was watching the movie and for a moment I thought, what if Manson predictions were right?! Then I remembered that, even if he hadn't been a mass murderer, he was an abject racist and no such thought ever crossed my mind again.

This thing was on Fandor for some reason.

Nick Cordero

This awful news reported in Variety:

After spending 18 days in intensive care with coronavirus, Broadway actor Nick Cordero will need to have his right leg amputated due to complications from the virus, his wife Amanda Kloots announced. 

Kloots shared the news on her Instagram Story on Saturday morning. Doctors had given Cordero blood thinners to help with clotting in his leg, but the treatment caused internal bleeding in his intestines. 

“They had him on blood thinners for the clotting and unfortunately the blood thinners were causing some other issues — blood pressure and some internal bleeding in his intestines. We took him off blood thinners but that again was going to cause some clotting in the right leg. So the right leg will be amputated today,” she said. 

Cordero entered the ICU on March 31 with trouble breathing and an initial diagnosis of pneumonia. After two tests for COVID-19 were negative, a third came back positive. Less than two weeks later, his health took a turn for the worst and he had to undergo emergency surgery.

“I got a phone call saying he had an infection in his lung that caused his fever to spike way above normal, which caused his blood pressure to drop and caused his heart to go into an irregular pattern,” Kloots had said in an Instagram Story on April 12. “He lost consciousness, he lost his pulse and they had to resuscitate him. It was very scary. They had a very hard time getting him back.” 

...

Cordero first appeared on Broadway in 2014’s “Bullets Over Broadway,” and he earned a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical for his role as Cheech. He’s also performed in “Waitress,” “A Bronx Tale” and on TV in CBS’ “Blue Bloods.”

Quarantined Shazam director makes horror movie starring wife

Me, I've been completely unproductive during this pandemic. Been doing a lot of cooking and eating. But look what one go-getter did:

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/04/shadowed-shazam-david-f-sandberg-quarantine-1202222728/

Another Jason Mann

I wanted to keep Project Greenlight alive in my heart just a little longer. I hoped I could find another cruel attack on Jason Mann somewhere online. I googled his name and found something on Linkedin: A production company in Maine run by a Jason Mann. But why did he not mention his big Project Greenlight win?

Because it was a different Jason Mann. There are quite a few them. It's a common name. This was the only one working in a related field.

Project Greenlight showed how easy it is to fail miserably and look like a jerk in the process. It should be horrifying to all the film school kids out there.

None of the movies made on that show have come out well. The one that did the best was a horror movie they made when the show left HBO and went to Bravo.

We've reached the point where anybody can make some kind of movie. You don't necessarily need money anymore. I'm a little surprised that there are still books being published telling you how to do it because by now it's pretty obvious how to make a movie with no money.

Now we need to figure out how to make a movie with no talent or ability. I have my own ideas which I've already discussed, but I have grave doubts about my theory.

Catfight (2016)

Filmmakers have aways defended movie violence by arguing that they show that violence is bad, but this was probably the first to show a realistic outcome.

Two middled aged women (Sandra Oh and Anne Heche) who hated each other in college run into each other.

It takes place in the near future. The United States has brought back the draft to fight a massive war in the middle east. Sandra Oh tells her son the war is necessary because "they don't do what we say". She's married to a wealthy military contractor.

Anne Heche is a lesbian and an artist who produces anti-war abstract painting. She's not making much money at it so she works as a bartender at a party Sandra Oh attends.

The two women get in a violent fight in a stairwell. It goes on for some time. I won't tell you the outcome but I'll mention that there was a local 50-year-old woman here who decided to become an amateur boxer. I don't know if her age played a role in it, but she wound up in a coma after her first bout.

I thought the movie was too even-handed. Both women were horrible.

Made for a modest $350 thousand.

curb your enthusiasm

I'm binge-watching the last season of curb your enthusiasm. I heard J Elvis Weinstein and Andy Kindler criticize it on a recent episode of their Thought Spiral podcast. They thought it's gone on too long and it was getting stupid. And to some extent the first episode of the season was a bit much. Larry David walks down the street and without a word grabs a couple's selfie stick and breaks it and knocks down a row of scooters.

But I didn't think that was nearly as bad as a couple of episodes in past seasons. One where he speaks at a Bat Mitzvah or some such event and addresses a rumor that he had engaged in an unspeakable sexual act. In another he uses an old gag I first saw on WKRP in Cincinnati. On that show, Gordon Jump tells Tim Reid that he and his wife are thinking about adopting but says it in such a way that Reid thinks he's confessing to being a pedophile. On curb your enthusiasm, Larry David does the same thing but says something that no human being would ever say.

Of course, as I write this, I have an episode on and it's awful. Richard Lewis falsely told people that Larry was suffering from a bleeding rectum. I don't know why he did this. I could go back and look but I won't.

I'm sure the show was better in the past. Even Larry David wanted to quit because it had gone downhill. But I didn't think it was that terrible.

Okay. Another episode's on. It's terrible.

I need to remember to quit this HBO free trial before they start charging me.

Something easy to prepare for

What is it, Monday? Still under quarantine. Thousands are dying and I can't risk bringing the virus home, so I'm not going anywhere. I did go out and start the car. I drove around the neighborhood, saw a few people walking, a woman jogging, a few other people driving around.

If I could go out and hit some drive throughs it would be nice, but I'm saving money this way, which is good because I'm unemployed. I have two uncashed paychecks and the place was broke so I won't be able to cash them unless a Small Business Administration loan comes though.

I'm listening to a podcast. It is or was Passover and a Jewish guy is telling how he was once asked to lead a Seder. He did and disappointed everyone there.

 I've known people who have never been religious who've eaten with people who unexpectedly asked to lead them in prayer. They had to resort to one they learned in a church preschool such as, "God is great, God is good/Let us thank Him for our Food. Amen." That's the one they used at my preschool during the Johnson Administration, around 1967.

While you're sitting at the computer and thinking about it, you might want to google an appropriate prayer for occasions like this. It could spare you social embarrassment. It's surprising that religious people will just ASSUME that you're religious, that you, too, pray every time you eat and that you aren't from a denomination whose prayers they would find heretical.

Here's a link to some. I would go with the Eastern Orthodox one just because it would be unfamiliar and they might think you were being extemporaneous. If you want the illusion of spontaneity, don't use one that rhymes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_(prayer)

Project Greenlight from 2015

I wouldn't last half a day in Hollywood with all that hugging.

I got a 7-day HBO free trial and binge-watched the last season of Project Greenlight. It was terribly controversial five years ago. I'm only watching it now and I feel stupid for writing about it at this late date, and I feel stupid for hating or at least for feeling sympathetic frustration with Jason Mann. I don't know if he was really the villain or if they edited the thing to make him look that way.

A sad story all around. Jason Mann won a contest. It should have been a dream come true but it became a reality show nightmare. Matt Damon humiliated himself and had to publicly apologize. Effie Brown worked tirelessly for an unappreciative director, all to make a movie that nobody liked.

These people are awfully sensitive. Matt Damon and Ben Afleck said that the last time they did the show it ended their friendship. After a slight disagreement with Effie Brown, the Farrelly Brothers stomped off in a huff. None of those guys had much to do with the making of the movie. They wandered in now and then and acted like big shots then left.

It made me feel like making a movie was an incredibly stupid thing to want to do.

There was a slight recurring theme. A couple of people praised Mann for not giving in to anything too quickly, for wanting something and sticking to it. And when Mann wanted to do a "scriptment" instead of a completed script, Effie Brown was troubled that the people in charge gave into it too quickly without any real discussion. If you're too flexible people will wonder why you wanted something in the first place.

I'm glad I didn't pay for HBO. I had watched some clips from the show on YouTube and watching the show itself added very little.

I turned on the movie they made, The Leisure Class, but being in isolation from the pandemic has thrown my sleep patterns off and I slept through most of it.

Don't act like an auteur until you see how your movie turns out.

And never be a flaming jackass.

Self Quarantine Diary

How long has it been? A fortnight? And before that all I did was go to work and back. They told me drive-through windows were safe but I didn't chance it. I did gas up the car though. Had little choice.

A few days ago, a woman knocked on the door. We ignored her. She came back again yesterday. I looked out the window and motioned to her to back away. She walked down the walk and I came out. She needed gas money. She lived in her truck. Okay. Wait here, I said. I was wearing these flannel pajama things and had to run in to get some money.

My mother walked out there and asked if she had somewhere to cook then got her some food my mother didn't want. I put it in a bag and put it on the porch with a twenty dollar bill. I wasn't going to spend it anywhere. I went back in and closed the door.

I think we should have just given her the money. She could buy her own food, something we can't do. My mother's 88 and I can't risk going out and bringing any virus back with me. My sister had been going out every couple of weeks and we can ask her to get us stuff.

There was a bag of flour on the porch my sister left there. Oh. Did she get me a jar of yeast? I'm going to need more of that before this nightmare is over.

I think it was a mistake getting 15 pounds of sticky rice. I've eaten it twice. The ramen I got is no picnic, either.

I read that a thirteen-year-old boy was buried and that no one from his family was there. They're reporting that around two thousand people are dying each day but the real number is much higher.

Neighbors were outside carrying on a conversation while on opposite sides of the street. Next door is a house that used to belong to an elderly couple. They died and some scumbag bought the place. It's rented to college students now and the morons were having a party.

I knew that a man who lives across the street from he has been in ill health. Learned he has leukemia. It's what killed the previous owner of the house, but I don't think the two things could be related since that guy left for Hollywood in the '50's. He was a big tall guy. I found pictures of him online getting a screen test for the role of Lurch in the old Addams Family series. He didn't get the part.

This house isn't nearly as big as I thought. How many hours a day do I spend in bed? I feel groggy all the time. I'm drink coffee. I have a bottle of caffeine pills, 100 mgs each, but they don't seem to do anything. I wonder if they're fake. I got them from Amazon.

I tried to talk to a friend in Russia in the morning but Skype wasn't functioning. She's in a large city in western Siberia. It's sort of the Seattle of Russia, home of the aircraft and scientific industries. The economy there must be great. She had complained that the computer company she worked for had so many new people she couldn't keep up. She didn't know anyone's name. I told her to address them as "comrade", but they don't do that. They're all working from home now.

What became of Jason Mann?

So what became of Jason Mann, the Project Greenlight guy nobody liked? It's been five years.

According to IMDb, he was "cinematographer" on a movie made in Slovenia called Vsi proti vsem (2019). Seems to be unavailable elsewhere although it has a title in English, All Against All.

Here's a clip:

And a trailer:

I wonder how they happened to hire him.

Well, poor devil. I have a feeling nobody would have liked me, either, but for different reasons. Nice that he's getting away and working abroad. It's something aspiring filmmakers should look into.

Even back in the '30's there were a couple of very cheap Yiddish-language movies that were produced in America but filmed in Poland just to save money. Even if you're working on a micro budget, think of Robert Rodriguez who filmed El Mariachi in Mexico one summer. When he got back to college in the fall, he looked forward to having people ask him what he did over the summer so he could tell them he made a foreign film.

Adam 12, Buddy Foster

There was a scene from an old episode of Adam 12. Martin Milner has to tell a child that his mother wasn't coming back. She had abandoned him and his brother and sister. The kid is played by Buddy Foster, Jodie Foster's older brother.

For years, Adam 12 was shown in syndication on a local station. They kept running a promo with that scene. I was a kid myself and I hated it. I wanted gunfights, not some child whining because he would never see his mother again.

Years later, I realized how deeply emotional the scene must have been.

Well, they're showing Adam 12 on TV again and I just saw that episode for the first time in over forty years. It wasn't that bad either way. Malloy had a surprisingly easy time breaking the news to the kid and it didn't bother the kid nearly as much as you'd think.

Buddy Foster has haunted me for years. That episode of Adam 12, the commercial where he asks Mr Owl how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, and there was a scene on Mayberry RFD I only saw once around 1970. I won't go into it, but I found it weirdly troubling. I had lost all interest in The Six Million Dollar Man by the time he appeared as the Wolf Boy.

I liked him in that movie where he played a southern rural degenerate teenager with Mercedes McCambridge as his mother.

Drive Ins

You know what would be a good business right now? A drive-in movie theater. Although, come to think of it, they make most of their money from the snack bar and you wouldn't want people getting out of their cars. Restrooms would be a problem, too.

During daylight hours, you could hold weddings, funerals, political rallies and church services at the drive-in, people safely isolated in their cars. There used to be drive-in churches in the United States.

There's a "church" here in town that was holding "services" in a local movie theater. It's the only local church I've seen advertised on TV. Of course, with the pandemic, they've had to cancel their Sunday services, but they somehow made a deal with a local TV station to do Easter on live TV.

They call it "Joy Church". According to the internet, there are others. It seems more like a chain than a denomination.

I would have to know if they were trinitarian---if they believed in the Holy Trinity. I don't care if they do or not, but how can a church be taken seriously if they don't have a position? They used to burn unitarians at the stake for rejecting the Trinity.

It's like movies and TV shows---Little House on the Prairie, for example. The people in it seem very religious, but the town has only one church, they don't specify the denomination, and no one seems to have any specific beliefs.

Contrast that with movies like Footloose or Inherit the Wind where the town has only one church that rules over the community with an iron fist.

Realistically, The Andy Griffith Show should have had Andy in a constant power struggle with the pastor of Mayberry's only church to see who would dominate the town.

Allen Garfield, RIP

Actor Allen Garfield has died from COVID-19 at age 80. I looked through his credits on IMDb.com. I've seen a number of things he was in over the years, but the thing I've always remembered him from was an episode of The Bob Newhart Show. He plays the manager of a resort having a bad year when Bob and Emily visit.

After showing them to their room, Garfield's character pauses. He tells Bob he knows what he's thinking. Would it offend him to offer him a tip since he's the manager? No, he said. It wouldn't.

I saw that as a kid and it's haunted me ever since. SHOULD you tip the manager?

John Prine. RIP

Singer-songwriter John Prine had died at 73 of complications from the coronavirus.

The first I heard of him was in high school. I was in a class called "Death and Dying". The teacher played a number of songs about death and one was John Prine's "Sam Stone".

I heard he was ill. I got the news he had died from this tweet by Josh "Elvis" Weinstein:

Some artists put a vibe into the world that is bigger than their art, great as it is. That's how I think of John Prine.

The Day The World Ended (Roger Corman, 1955)

A good coronavirus movie, I guess, about people who can't leave the house because of radiation. There's no mention of toilet paper, but they're worried about having enough food stockpiled.

A man and his daughter (Paul Birch, Lori Nelson) have survived the nuclear holocaust. Their house is situated where mountains and wind currents protect them from radiation. Then people start showing up at their door. There's a geologist who was looking for uranium (Richard Denning), a low level mobster (Mike Connors) and his stripper friend (Adele Jergens), an old prospector and his mule, and there's a guy who had been out in the radiation and is becoming a bit of mutant.

Shot in ten days for $96,000 (less than a million dollars today.)

I read somewhere that this was the first nuclear war movie that young people took seriously. I saw it on TV in the middle of the night when I was thirteen or fourteen and it scared me. I wasn't worried about radioactive mutants---just nuclear war. By the time the nuclear freeze movement came along in the '80's, I was over that fear. I was involved in anti-nuclear groups at the university but was more laid back about it than the others.

Available free on Amazon Prime.

Lee Fierro, RIP

Could do this scene again with Donald Trump. "You knew and you did nothing!"

Lee Fierro has died of COVID-19 at age 91. She played Mrs Kitner, the mother whose young son was horribly killed in Jaws. She appeared in Jaws: The Revenge and more recently in The Mistover Tale.

According to the trivia section of imdb:

Several decades after the filming of Jaws (1975), Lee Fierro, who plays Mrs. Kintner, walked into a seafood restaurant and noticed that the menu had an "Alex Kintner Sandwich". She commented that she had played his mother so many years ago. The owner of the restaurant ran out to meet her - none other than Jeffrey Voorhees, who had played her son. They hadn't seen each other since the original movie shoot.

Honor Blackman, RIP

Back during the kung fu movie craze in the late 'seventies, I liked to go to libraries and look at books on martial arts. One was a book on self-defense by Honor Blackman which seemed to focus on Judo techniques she used a lot on TV. She demonstrated that thing they always do that I never understood. You grab a person by one hand and somehow flip them. I think in reality you would just really hurt their arm.

Blackman appeared in the British series The Avengers for a couple of seasons then, at 39, left to play Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.

Honor Blackman has died at age 94.

Reptilicus (US-Denmark 1961)

The movie has a cult following in Denmark. It was Denmark's only giant monster movie. AIP re-shot a lot of it English for the American version.

The Japanese realized they could get around the time and nuisance of stop motion animation by using a guy in a rubber suit in their Godzilla movies. The Danes did them one better and used a marionette.
 
I don't know what the next step would have been. Perhaps a sophisticated hand puppet. CGI has rendered all this obsolete although there was a filmmaker who demanded that his computer-generated monsters be made to look like stop-motion models.

With a combination of green screens, puppets and cheap digital effect, I wonder how cheaply you could make a giant monster movie. You think it could be done cheaply enough that you could make a movie of your town and a few surrounding communities being destroyed by a giant puppet and sell a few thousand DVDs to local residents? Wouldn't people pay to see their own town being destroyed in a horror movie?

"Look! There's our house! Ha ha ha!"

Zero budget COVID-19 movie has been made

I wrote this in a blog several days ago:

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.

I don't know what I was picturing exactly.

Well, somebody's done something like it. Read about it here:

https://www.cracked.com/article_27383_the-first-movie-about-this-pandemic-looks-real-bad.html

The "Human" Factor, Edward Dmytryk, 1976

I guess it's pretty common. A while back I watched a live action Saturday morning science fiction show I had watched as a kid in the 1970's. I was shocked. It was directed by Ted Post just a few years after Magnum Force and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Maybe I held those movies in too high a regard, but I was surprised that a director I'd heard of at all worked on that show. Maybe he was taking it easy for a while, working an easy gig.

In the case of Edward Dmytryk, he went into a long decline. The "Human" Factor was his last feature film, shot in Italy starring George Kennedy.

Kennedy works on a U.S. military base in Italy. He comes home and finds his family has been murdered. He sets out to get the people who did it.

Kennedy plays a computer guy. They don't explain how he knows how to track down terrorists, but movies about people who are trained in that sort of thing, where we're supposed to root for experienced killers, always bothered me. Like James Bond. This movie has one thing in common with The Man with the Golden Gun: George Kennedy drives an AMC Matador and even has a high speed chase through heavy Naples traffic.

One of the villains in the movie is a Palestinian; another is an American anti-war activist. Dmytryk was supposed to be such a liberal. Once McCarthyism ran its course, he should have gone back to being a Communist.

Dmytryk worked as a film professor after this. He authored influential works on film editing and directing.

Jigsaw (UK, 1963)

An uncharacteristic moment from the film.

Black and white, wide screen. Police procedural. Brighton detectives investigate when  a woman is found murdered in a beach house. Made Britain look quite pleasant considering the subject matter. Police were polite and the people they talked to seemed nice enough. I would have liked living there even with a murderer running loose.

Contrast that with Dragnet which started every episode with a travelogue showing how great Los Angeles was before revealing the place was lousy with child molesters, con men, murderers, Nazis, drug addicts, juvenile delinquents and hippies.

Black and white, widescreen. Directed by Val Guest. Available on Cohen Media Channel.

Sara (Poland, 1997)

I really didn't understand the gunfight amidst the aquariums. Could they not see each other through the glass, or did the water distort what they saw? Would the water have stopped the bullets? In the credits, they said that no fish were harmed in the making of the movie, but I'm not sure I trust them.

Made in Poland, released in 1997. An organized crime boss hires an alcoholic ubermensch as bodyguard for his teenage daughter. The bodyguard soon begins sleeping with her.

Remember how people thought The Blue Lagoon was probably good for young people because it showed that sex will get you pregnant? The same thing here. Probably more a warning to middle aged alcoholic men.

Too many people got killed in this thing. In one sequence, some men are sent to beat up the alcoholic. They kill his father, he kills a couple of them, but they're careful to only beat him up a little and not shoot him.

Available on Fandor.

Hud (1963)

Years ago, I watched the movie Blue Denim (1959) starring Brandon de Wilde as a 15-year-old who gets his girlfriend an illegal abortion. I wanted to see other movies he was in as a teenager, so I watched All Fall Down (1962) and Hud (1963) which were strangely similar movies. In both, de Wilde plays a kid who idolizes someone he shouldn't, Warren Beatty in All Fall Down and Paul Newman in Hud.

Hud was set in Texas. Lonnie (de Wilde) lives with his grandfather (Melvin Douglas) and Uncle Hud (Paul Newman) on his grandfather's ranch. The cattle are put under quarantine because of hoof and mouth disease.

Melvin Douglas is distressed at the thought that his cattle may have to be killed which I found a little surprising. Don't they slaughter them anyway?

I had forgotten how much western dialog there was in it. Douglas refers to dying as "throwing in the sponge".  At a funeral someone says that the man went to a better place and de Wilde says, "not unless dirt is a better place than air."

Poor Brandon de Wilde died after a car accident at age thirty.