Color Me Blood Red, Herschel Gordon Lewis (1965)

The best line in the movie was a young man's oddly adolescent cry, "Holy bananas! It's a girl's leg!" when he and his girlfriend find a dead body buried in the sand.

A gore movie. The story of an artist who begins painting with human blood. It's something artists actually did decades later, using bodily fluids and fecal matter as artistic media. I don't know that any of their work was of lasting value since we don't know how long it would be before paintings made with that stuff would start  to disintegrate.

It was an hour and a half which was long considering how little happened in it. Unless I missed something, only two people were killed. Had a lot of terrible scenes of two young couples hanging around on the beach and of the artist being an obnoxious eccentric.

Available on the Criterion Channel if you can believe that.

The Naked Spur (1953)

I don't know who they were kidding. They kept putting the word "naked" in movie titles when there was absolutely no chance of any nudity.

The Naked Spur was a technicolor western. I never liked westerns, but looking at other movies they made back then, you can see why people went for them.

James Stewart has been hunting for Robert Ryan for whom there is a $5,000 reward. He meets an old prospector and a recently discharged cavalry officer who help catch him. Stewart is distressed about having to split the reward three ways. There are only five speaking roles.

James Stewart isn't a nice guy in it, but he's the most appealing of them. Robert Ryan and the Army guy smile way too much. I was on the Indians' side, but they effortlessly murder a large group of them. James Stewart is shot in the leg. Initially he just limps a little and gets on his horse without even slapping a bandage on it, but it wasn't completely unrealistic. He becomes delirious for a little while.

With Janet Leigh, seven years before Psycho. Robert Ryan was almost unrecognizable just two years before Bad Day at Black Rock.

I don't know what the spur or its nakedness had to do with anything.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Tread

Documentary about Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado, who thought everyone was mocking him after losing a zoning dispute. He had a muffler shop and had some skill at welding. He attacked the town in an armored bulldozer in 2004. Destroyed homes and buildings belonging to people he was mad at.

He left behind a tape recording explaining his actions. Referred to his "righteous anger".

I was surprised at how well-armed the police were in such a small town. They were no match for the giant armored bulldozer, but it was so slow-moving it was only a threat to the buildings. Although there was a .50 caliber rifle pointing out the back.

There was an old Ray Harryhausen movie where they release a circus elephant to fight a large dinosaur. It was sort of like that here. There was a big unstoppable armored bulldozer and they tried using their own bulldozer and road grader to battle it.

Available on Netflix.

Spotlight (2015)

So I watched this thing on Netflix, Spotlight, about how the Boston Globe exposed a massive child molestation scandal and cover-up by the Catholic Church.

I remember when news of this first appeared. There was a press conference on TV. I was astonished, not by the crimes themselves or the scope of the scandal, but that a Catholic who investigated it said that he hated to say it, but he would probably advise people whose children had been molested by priests to report it to the police.

After all the high brow arthouse and foreign films I try to watch, it was so nice to watch something normal in English.

According to a "visual blog" called Information is Beautiful, the film is 76% accurate. Which is pretty accurate, I guess.

With Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams.

Available on Netflix.

"Take Your Pills", Netflix documentary

Seems like EVERYBODY takes Adderall now. When the house next door to me was a rental, the college students who lived there were outside loudly talking about taking it. It was night and I could hear them inside. I went out to ask them to keep it down or go inside, but I stood and listened.

Woody Allen mentioned Adderall in his new memoir. When I took a relative to the emergency room, it was on his list of medications. Comedians Andy Kindler and Josh Weinstein talk about it on their podcast.

Everyone gets Adderall but me. I'm not sure how I feel about this. A fifteen-year-old had a heart attack taking it.

Take Your Pills is a documentary on Netflix about Adderall and other such stimulants and their widespread use. Doctors who were early advocates for its use for children now regret it.

Ritalin was first created by a chemist for his wife, Rita (hence the name), to help her lose weight and have more energy. The guy sounds like a monster.

The documentary seemed kind of middling which may be what you want in a documentary of this type. They interview a guy who was unhappy that he was forced to take it as a kid, a mother who had a photo of her son's bruised face---he would get into fights when he didn't take his Adderall. And bourgeois college students illegally buying and selling their Adderall, sometimes on public forums, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was a serious crime.

There were kids who were embarrassed that they had to take it as children. There was a clip from a movie. We see a shot of a young man asking if "any of you take Adderall and want to make fifty bucks". A reverse shot reveals that he's talking to a group of bewildered grade school boys sitting on their bikes.

Uncle Yanco (1967)

They call San Francisco "The Holy City", the "City of Love".  I never knew that, but Agnes Varda said this. She praises psychedelic art and compares night in the city to God.

I haven't been to San Francisco in thirty years. It was all right, but it was hard to find parking. I had a friend there who went to work in the tech industry after graduating from MIT. He drove us on some of the roads where the chase scene in Bullitt was filmed.

Agnes Varda goes there to see her Uncle Yanco who she never met, an artist who left France to live in Greece and then fled the military dictatorship that Lyndon Johnson imposed on the country. In the U.S., Yanco sides with the college kids opposing the Vietnam War but he isn't an activist.

I didn't care for Yanco's art. He mentions that it's expensive living there and that San Francisco is less Bohemian than it looks.

And he's not her uncle---he's her father's cousin, her first cousin once removed.

I never travel anywhere. Lately, I've comforted myself with the thought that when you travel abroad, you're going to see people who never go anywhere. You go to Paris to see Parisians in their natural state, people who don't know any better than to eat in sidewalk cafes.

I still have a role to play in world travel. If anyone comes here, they're coming to see provincials like me. To them, I'm a peasant. Even the foreign students are richer than me.

The documentary was full of hippies. I'm guessing they all came from somewhere else.

20 minutes. Available on the Criterion Channel.

Chantal Akerman, Down There

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian Zionist. She wasn't a refugee. She had her own country. But she filmed this thing mostly in an apartment in Tel Aviv. This is supposed to be some sort of meditation on Israel.

I thought it would be a good Pandemic movie. So far, it's a "slow cinema" version of Rear Window. I'm at the forty minute mark and all we've done is spy on her horrible Zionist neighbors as they walk around not caring about their crimes against humanity.

John Saxon, RIP

John Saxon has passed away at age 84. I can't remember the first things I saw him in, but I think he was the first serious actor I recognized by name. I was surprised when I first saw his name in the opening credits of Enter the Dragon.

When he first met Bruce Lee, Bruce told him about the TV show, Kung Fu, that it was his idea, that he was going to star in it himself, but the network wanted a white actor to star. John Saxon didn't tell him him that he had been offered the part himself. He was Italian-American and in those grim days, he played a lot of non-white roles.

Olivia de Havilland, RIP

Olivia de Havilland has died at age 104. She died in her sleep in her home in Paris.

She played Melanie Hamiliton in Gone with the Wind.

I used to quote her now and then. I only said this to my sister because she was the only one who would get it, and she was the only who expressed her seething hatred for people. When she did, I would tell her in my Millie Hamilton voice, "He's just high-spirited."

I had to stop doing it after running it completely into the ground.

Former child actor Mickey Kuhn, 88, is now the last surviving actor in the credited cast of Gone with the Wind.

Rock All Night, Roger Corman, 1957

The title made it sound like a teen movie, but the cast mostly seemed middle aged. There was a young couple that got kicked out of the bar for not having ID, but the young, fresh-faced underage boy had a receding hairline. Maybe he really did leave his license at home.

Dick Miller has a Napoleon complex. He gets kicked out of a fancy night club for mouthing off to a drunken customer. He cleverly calls him "fatty" and tells him he stinks. But that was completely gratuitous. It padded out the movie and let them include a couple of songs by the Platters. 

The bulk of the action takes place at a seedy bar. It was kind of cool seeing Russell Johnson, The Professor on Gilligan's Island, as a psychopathic killer. He and his partner are on the run after murdering two old people. They take the patrons hostage. 

Dick Miller keeps needling the larger fellows to DO something even though Russell Johnson would simply shoot them. 

It was only an hour long, based on an episode of Fireside Theater, a half-hour anthology series.

The ending was anti-climactic.

Corman regular Mel Welles as an aging beatnik acting as an agent for a rock and roll band. With Jonathan Haze and Barboura Morris.

I'm pro-Roger Corman, but this was dull and talky. Most of the cast remains seated. The whole thing was filmed in a small studio which made the shots of the cops surrounding the bar a bit comical. They were ten feet from the door but used a bullhorn to talk to the criminals inside.

I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that police take the criminals away in the end, but, strangely, they leave the murder weapons behind sitting on the bar. Maybe the killers will get away with it after all.

Regis Philbin RIP

I had an old friend who was on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I haven't seen him more than twenty years. The last time I communicated with him was by email around the time he was on the show and I never heard from him again. He addressed Regis by name at first, more than seemed natural. My friend was pleasant and charming but Regis played it cool. My friend either relaxed or he focused on the questions.

It was as close as I've come to a personal encounter with Regis Philbin and that was just watching him on TV.

Coming Home, 1978

What happened to Coming Home? A search on Roku found nineteen movies and TV shows with that title, all made in the 21st century and not the one I was looking for.

Is it because liberals (or at least mainstream Democratic politicians) are pro-war now? Republicans are, too, but that goes without saying. Maybe Jon Voight becoming such a right-wing freak played some role. The movie was nominated for eight Oscars and won three.

I always thought that it should have been made while the Vietnam War was still going on. I understand that it wouldn't have been as well-received, but it serves little purpose to warn the kids that they might come home in a wheelchair when the war is already over.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the movie would have disappeared if it had been made back then, as it has now.

Barbarella (1968)

Long ago, in the days before VCR's, I had this friend whose mother was going to college. They seemed impoverished but they stayed on the cutting edge in certain ways. They had a video disk player. It would play movies on large, LP-sized disks. They weren't available for rent anywhere, so they could only watched the movies that came with the player when they bought it. One was The Godfather and  another was Barbarella. I don't know why his mother chose an R-rated sex movie. It had Jane Fonda and looked like science fiction, so they may have gotten the wrong impression. My friend would sing along with the theme song.

Directed by Roger Vadim. His first wife was Brigitte Bardot. Fonda was wife #3. 

Mark Rappaport, in his documentary about Jean Seberg, commented on the tendency of male directors to cast their wives in roles like this. Elderly Republican pervert Clint Eastwood gave Sandra Locke a rape scene in every movie of his she was in. 

I tried to watch Barbarella back then and never made it very far. I have it on at this very moment on The Criterion Channel. It's well-made anyway, better than other science fiction movies capitalist countries produced at the time. I never really liked Jane Fonda. Mike Kuchar noted that they stole some stuff from his underground film Sins of the Fleshapoids.

On a 1978 episode of Saturday Nigh Live, Bill Murray played a dim witted movie critic who reviews Coming Home and laments that Jane Fonda's anti-war activism kept her from getting more good roles like Barbarella. Murray then courageously speaks out against the Vietnam War three years after it ended, which was the problem with Coming Home. It should have been made ten years earlier.

Come to think of it, I haven't seen Coming Home anywhere in years. Maybe Barbarella WAS of greater lasting merit.

Scene of the Crime, France, 1986

Once again, the French are as dumb as the rest of us. A scrawny, rather obnoxious French tween goes around lying all the time, making up crazy stories, and now no one will believe him when some good-looking criminals on the run demand money and try to murder him. Maybe this sort of boy-who-cried-wolf story was a fresh and original in France.

Made in the mid-'80's. The escaped criminals had surprisingly stylish '80's haircuts.

The kid was preparing for his confirmation but the priest was mad at him. His grandmother tells him that God will grant him a wish for his confirmation. They have guests for dinner including the priest and she unwisely asks the kid what his wish is. He hesitates at first, then says he wants his school destroyed with everyone in it.

I watched maybe a quarter of Scene of the Crime, started fast forwarding and finally turned it off at around the halfway mark and started watching it again later, so you probably shouldn't listen to me.

It was on the Cohen Media Channel. The artwork they used for it was from a 1949 movie of the same name. I don't know if they put up the wrong art or the wrong movie. These high brow streaming video channels have some bad movies. Fandor has The Wild Geese with Roger Moore and Richard Burton and they all show old Herschell Gordon Lewis movies now.

I thought a better movie was Sudden Terror (1970). Mark Lester as a kid who tells a lot of crazy lies so no one believes him when he's a witness in an assassination. In the last twenty minutes, his grandfather karate kicks a cop down some stairs and shoots him with his own gun.

Marguerite (2015)

A French/Czech/Belgian co-production apparently inspired by the life of Florence Foster Jenkins. There was a little more going on. Marguerite is a wealthy woman in the 1920's who sings with a music club. The poor woman can't sing at all but she has devoted her life to music and no one will tell her the truth. Now she wants to perform in front of a huge crowd. Her husband tries to gently talk her out of it, but a conniving household employee hopes to cash in on her humiliation.

A rave review by a snotty Dadaist sets events in motion.

I thought her singing had a strange appeal. I've never really liked music and novelty acts tend to appeal to me. I have a CD of Florence Foster Jenkins around here somewhere. And Tiny Tim and Mrs Miller.

The movie seems rather cruel. Like the short stories by successful writers about delusional people trying desperately to be writers. I've read them by Patricia Highsmith, Tom Clark and heard Garrison Keillor read one he wrote. There are movies by successful directors about failed directors. There was Sir Lawrence Olivier's movie, The Entertainer, based on the play in which he plays a washed up music hall comic in the 1950's, long after music hall was kaput or should have been.

They cut open the neck of a small dead deer in the movie, so be prepared for that if you want to see this thing. I guess they don't have a Humane Society over there.

Available from The Cohen Media Channel on Amazon Prime if nowhere else.

The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski, literary fraud

Roman Polanski and Jerzy Kosinski.

I see there's a movie version of The Painted Bird out based on the book by literary fraud Jerzy Kosinki. Kosinski was Polish and Jewish. He and his family spent the Nazi occupation living comfortably in a Polish village. If the Nazis found them, they would have burned the village with the villagers in it. There was nothing in it for the people there to hide a Jewish family among them. And to thank them, Kosinski wrote the book he claimed was autobiographical portraying them as essentially subhuman.

So I watched a documentary on You Tube called The Painted Boy, made years ago after Kosinski's suicide. They talked with writers and journalists who knew him or reported on him. Most of them seemed to take both sides at the same time. They knew he was a fraud but they still assumed that The Painted Bird was true.

The literary editor for The Nation magazine said that she had gotten a letter from him which was so crudely written that she realized that he couldn't possibly have written books in English.

She talked with others about it. There were already rumors about him and, in 1982, an article appeared in The Village Voice accusing him of plagiarism using ghost writers and translators to write his books for him. He had started out as a front for the CIA putting a pen name on anti-Communist tracts they had written.

When Being There became available in Poland, critics there pointed out similarities to a Polish novel written in the 1930's.

I don't know if he actually reformed after he was exposed. I heard that at a public event, someone asked him why the Poles didn't save the Jews from the Nazis. He asked why the Jews didn't save the Poles. The Nazis murdered millions of Polish Christians. They were in no position to be of any help to anyone.

The one time I heard Kosinski was on the old Larry King radio show. Someone asked about Poland and anti-Semitism and I suppose collaboration with the Nazis. He mentioned one fact, that Poland was the only country under Nazi occupation where the Germans would kill entire families if they were found to be harboring Jews.

I looked Kosinski up on Wikipedia several years ago. It had both versions of his history, both stated as fact. They briefly recounted the story of The Painted Bird as if it were true and, a couple of paragraphs later, gave his real history.

There are people who defended him doing this, using ghost writers and translators. In fact, the author of the article in the Village Voice thought that if Kosinski had just said how he did it, it would have been fine, or he had refused to discuss his writing process at all, there wouldn't have been a problem. But he didn't do that.

His work for the CIA may have been a good part of the problem. If he admitted he didn't write his books, he would have to admit that he didn't write the stuff the CIA had published. He'd have to admit that he had been a front for the U.S. government which would have destroyed his credibility.

I don't plan to see The Painted Bird. It may be like other frauds---like Sleepers or that Whitley Streiber flying saucer book---where things that seem plausible on paper look absurd under the merciless glare of the klieg lights. If you see the movie, you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that it was fiction although worse things have happened.

It's what I hated about Good Will Hunting. There's something really repulsive about a fan fiction-like fantasy about having been a horribly abused child.

John Cassavetes' Gloria, 1980

There were things I didn't like about it, but Gena Rowlands was quite convincing as a gun moll with the mob after her and a child she's stuck taking care of.

In one scene she confronts a group of mafiosi and she keeps referring to one as "the sissy". They all know who she means somehow and the childishness of the insult makes it even more insulting.

Buck Henry appears briefly at the beginning as a mob accountant. He seems like a normal family man in over his head, but then he makes it clear he has the same mentality they do.

I still say kill the mafia. We know who they are. Guantanamo is sitting right there. Declare them enemy combatants and get rid of them. Mussolini crushed them in Italy. What's the point of living in an increasingly fascist state if they won't even do that?

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Woody Allen's Apropos of Nothing: I finished a book

Finished Woody Allen's memoir. It was always interesting. At the end, he wrote at some length about the accusations against him by the ghastly Farrow clan. He noted the thing I've point out several times---that he pays actors the union minimum. They keep talking about stars like Timothee Chalamet who denounced him and donated the money they were paid for appearing in his movies but they never say exactly how much money that was. Millionaire pretty boy Chalamet donated far less money than the girls in the movie who refused to denounce Allen.

Earlier in the book, he mentioned the Mariel Hemingway thing. Allen violated his rule of never being a houseguest and went to visit the Hemingway clan in rural Idaho. He was a bad fit since they did a lot of walking outdoors. I don't know if it was a neurosis or just a strong personal preference, but Allen made arrangements to fly home when he found out he'd have to share a bathroom with Mariel's father. In the meantime, he invited Mariel to go Paris to promote Manhattan. She didn't want to go and Allen went home which she interpreted as his leaving in a huff.

Allen argues correctly that the accusations against him were investigated at length and proven to be false. In addition, he took a polygraph test which Mia Farrow refused to do. There were servants working for Farrow who saw her coaching Dylan. One found Dylan crying because, she said, her mother wanted her to lie about her father.

Some of the stooges who attacked the book accused Allen of self-pity, but I didn't see it. There are worse things than self-pity in any case, like mindlessly believing a false accusation of child molestation. They might explain what they think an innocent, falsely accused non-self-pitying person might say, hypothetically.

He talked a little about movie making. He tends to film in master shots, in long takes and doesn't shoot coverage, or not much of it anyway. Filming is more interesting when you don't shoot everything over and over from every possible angle, but it can make it difficult for the editors. For Hannah and Her Sisters, they used an intertitle to cover up a hole in the editing. A single intertitle would be weird, so they put intertitles at various points in the movie.

When he talked about the first movie he directed, Take the Money and Run, he said he wasn't nervous. One of the guys who put up the money thought he should be, but Allen shrugged it off. It wasn't rocket science. He knew what he wanted. He'd shoot retakes until he got it and move on to the next shot. This is actually controversial now. Allen has been attacked for laziness for not continuing to shoot retakes after he got what he was after, like not wasting time and celluloid was a moral failing. He brought that movie in ahead of schedule and under budget.

Woody Allen vs Gallagher

I used to do predictions for the new year. Long ago, in the early '80's, a friend and I sat in a restaurant in the middle of the night. I had a roll of cash register paper in my coat pocket. We had read the psychic predictions in The Weekly World News so he started making his predictions which I wrote down. I left that roll if paper in my coat pocket and as the next winter rolled around I found it in there and read it and his predictions started coming true. And these were specific and surprising things. He predicted the assassination of Indira Gandhi and a couple of other things---they spotted a planet orbiting another star for the first time, something I didn't think was possible. After that, he made predictions every year. He wanted to repeat his success and played it safe. He kept predicting Pat Nixon's demise, but she didn't die until the year he didn't predict it.

When I wrote mine, I kept predicting that someone like Bob Denver would make a low budget movie and be hailed as the new Woody Allen. I predicted that a few times a year. I don't think I ever predicted Gallagher would be the new Woody Allen.

Gallagher was a prop comic. He was known for using a sledge hammer to smash watermelons on stage. 

And he was big in his day. He had a number of Showtime specials. I saw one. I thought he was funny at the time but I was in high school. What did I know.

More recently, Gallagher has become bitter and racist. There were elements of that in his early work, too. He was interviewed on Marc Maron's podcast and told about an early Iranian-hating joke. Gallagher was balding with long hair on the sides and back, he wore suspenders and roller skates. Deeply embarrassing today. 

He defended his racist jokes on Maron's show. 

"Can I do a Jew joke that they don't want to pay?" he asked, perhaps not knowing Maron was Jewish.

"Why? It's not true."

"It's not true---why do people laugh?"

He stomped off Maron's show---out of the hotel room where they were recording. I saw a video on YouTube of him being kicked off a radio show. They kindly let him come on to promote a local appearance somewhere. He showed up too early then he was rude to the host.

Gallagher has taken to criticizing current comedians. He doesn't like them drinking water on stage and he thinks they should scale back the obscene language.

So I just read Woody Allen say the same thing in his book. For centuries, actors have performed Shakespeare on stage without bottled water. Allen thought they should be less dirty. He was fine with dirtiness but thought they should be more selective. Express themselves more simply maybe, I don't know.

On the other hand, Allen said that current comedians have taken comedy far beyond anything he did in his stand-up days. 

Gallagher thinks they shouldn't talk about themselves or any serious issues in their lives.

"They can't play a state fair," he said.

"Who wants to play a state fair necessarily?" Maron said.

"Everybody," Gallagher said.

So. That's where all this was going. There's a single point of agreement between Gallagher and Woody Allen, although they likely have different reasons for thinking what they do and Woody Allen isn't an idiot.

Maybe it's like James Bond. People tend to prefer Sean Connery to Roger Moore, but is it only because '60's fashions look better to people today than '70's fashions do? 

Woody Allen did have a brief period of balding with long hair in Sleeper, but generally his hair has been tastefully cropped and his clothes have always looked normal except for the saddle shoes he wore for a time.

But, no, no. The differences between Gallagher and Woody Allen aren't matters of fashion. Of course they aren't. What am I thinking.

I continue reading Apropos of Nothing

Mia Farrow gazing at Ronan, ignoring former favorite Fletcher Previn.

I continued reading. I'm up to the molestation accusations against Woody Allen.

It's getting hard to read. It's like trying to re-watch Breaking Bad. I know all the terrible things that will happen in each episode and I already know the terrible ordeal Allen, Soon-Yi and Moses went through.

He noted that Mia Farrow was from a degenerate family. That's my word for it, not his. Her parents were drunks, her brother is in prison for child molesting and he was apparently sexually aggressive with his sisters when they were kids. Mia Farrow wasn't estranged from him---he had contact with her and her children which ought to concern her more than it seems to.

There's alcoholism and drug addiction in the family. She had three brothers. One committed suicide, one died flying a plane and there's the child molester. Mia was no picnic herself. She asked Allen to marry her when they'd only been dating a short time and said she wanted to have his child.

There's some new information about her favoring some children over others, especially her biological children over her adopted children. She favored Fletcher when they first started dating. At one point, Woody had to go to Paris and wanted Mia to come but she'd only go if she could take Fletcher. Woody asked if it wouldn't bother the other kids that only he got to go.

One thing about this book----Woody Allen has always been known to be terribly shy, unable to deal with parties. He has trouble talking to people, he can't make small talk with the actors he's considering and wishes he could just hire them without speaking to them. But he does so much socializing. I don't think I could do that. Just the meals with people would be too much.

I was surprised a year or two ago to learn that the world is full of people who won't eat alone in restaurants and won't go to movies alone. I've never considered eating or sitting silently in a theater to be social experiences. But for some reason I read a post online from a guy who desperately wanted to see a new Star Wars movie but he had been out of town, his friends had already seen it and he couldn't possible go alone. What if the girl at the candy counter thought he had no friends! What then?

I always bring food home and eat and watch TV. Every meal is like dinner theater.

Gregg Araki's "The Living End" (1992)

I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. An early entry in New Queer Cinema. A road movie about a pair of HIV positive men. One has nothing to lose and other does.

Luke narrowly but effortlessly escapes a pair of serial killer lesbians and now has their gun. He wisely kills three men who are about to attack him with baseball bats. He meets Jon when he jumps in his car to flee.

Made for around $20 thousand. Araki planned to film without sound and dub, but Jon Jost convinced him record live sound.

I liked it better after reading a negative review by a prissy Washington Post critic.

The two stars each had two other acting credits, one for an CBS Schoolbreak Special in 1984. Others in the movie had longer filmographies.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Gohatto, Japan, 1999

1865. An androgynous teen samurai joins a group of elite samurai most of whom are openly attracted to him. One of the head samurai wants to start the boy down the path of heterosexuality and assigns a man the task of taking the young fellow to a brothel, but the kid misunderstands and thinks the guy is hitting on him. Then the kid starts hitting on the man. That's just one plot point, not a synopsis.

There are a number of sword fights. The most violent gay movie I've seen unless you count Lawrence of Arabia or Ben Hur. There's a twist ending.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

More Apropos of Nothing

Something in the book I found weirdly interesting about a brush Woody Allen had with Henry Morgan aka Harry Morgan, Colenol Potter on M*A*S*H* and Bill Gannon on Dragnet. Morgan had started out playing the heavy in movies. I saw an old movie in which he was frighteningly convincing as a constantly angry abusive father. The teenage boy in that movie must have been wetting the bed for weeks after working with him.

I don't know if Morgan was in character or what, but Allen writes:

I'm on Merv Griffin with Henry Morgan, that nasty, cantankerous curmudgeon. He steps on my opening punchline. He goes after me. I try to go to a routine about my childhood. He says "Don't gimme that. I had two parents, too." I said, "Really? What were they?"

The audience went wild. Morgan shut up.

But some time later, Morgan came to Allen's stage play Don't Drink the Water. The play was in trouble. Morgan came back stage and talked to Allen. He came to it several times and they would eat and walk around together, Morgan making suggestions on how to improve the show.

So strange. Like Mel Brooks being friends with Dick Van Patten. Showfolk aren't snobs like we are. Like I am, anyway.

Woody Allen's Apropos of Nothing

Finally bought Woody Allen's memoir, Apropos of Nothing. I'm just a couple if chapters in. His writing is very good. It's like some of his movies, the ones that are perfectly coherent and comprehensible but which you couldn't possibly write a synopsis of. Try writing an outline to Radio Days. 

I'm up to his late teen years.

Allen presents his teenage self as a failed athlete, a failed magician, a failed musician---he was good at all three but not nearly good enough. But that's how it was for all of us. We all had hobbies and interests that could never amount to anything even though there were people in the world who earned a living at them.

He eventually succeeded at joke writing. He was in high school and his uncle, an agent, suggested he send them to newspaper columnists who back then apparently threw in a few jokes. Terrible 1950's jokes.

It sounds like, today, Allen would have failed at that, too. It's just that the bar was incredibly low at the time. I've read joke books by successful comedians of the 1950's and they were awful. I just assumed that it was a different time, that if the comedians of today were whisked back in time, no one would understand them. Now I'm not sure that's true.

Allen went into how poorly educated he was which I think is probably true. You look at all the stuff he's said about how bad the schools were he went to. He says  he only started reading books so he'd be able to make conversation with the smart girls.

His great gift was the ability to throw in references that made people think he knew way more than he did. He told about a story he wrote in the fifth grade with references to Freudian psychology. It impressed the teachers, but he knew nothing about it.

Any lessons here for the rest of us? I guess that most of your dreams are probably a lot of work so don't pursue them. Find something that comes easily. Follow the path of least resistance. Allen had to work constantly practicing the magic and the sports and the music and they went nowhere.

I guess he was practicing the "jokes", too. He said he would sit in movie theaters and make "funny" comments about the film. Others sitting close by would either laugh or tell him to shut up.

Ironically, he doesn't want people watching his movies on TV. Wants them to see them in theaters. I still think it's because he gets a cut of the box office. Maybe he wants to give the next Woody Allen a chance to hone his skills.

From Woody Allen's memoir

Man, I should read Woody Allen's memoir. I should have at least read more ABOUT it. Here's from Showbiz 411, March 23, 2020. Click the link to read the whole thing:

...More shockingly, Woody reveals in the book something his adopted son, Moses Farrow, told him. That Ronan’s famous childhood story of spending months in a hospital with a leg infection– and having to use crutches for a long time– is not true.

Woody writes: “Listen to Moses, who was there and described things:

“After Ronan finished law school, Mia had him undergo cosmetic surgery to extend his legs and gain a few inches in height. I told her I couldn’t imagine putting someone through the ordeal for cosmetic reasons. My mother’s response was simple, ‘You need to be tall to have a career in politics.’

It was, of course, a long and painful process for Ronan, who had his legs broken a few times and reconstructed to lengthen them. The insurance company didn’t see the medical necessity and refused to pay for it. Of course, Mia and Ronan tell a different story but that’s what happened.” The covering story handed out about Ronan’s knee problems, his walker, and months of reconstruction was based on his actual contracting of a disease while working abroad. This was supposed to account for the surgery, but Moses was present during much of the painful process. Meanwhile, Mia might put Ronan through this leg-breaking barbarism to satisfy her plans for his future, while I’m the one the judge sticks with a monitor.”

Photographic evidence from another website.

The surgery, by the way, exists and is even more popular today apparently. It does sound barbaric.

Woody is held up now for ridicule by the Farrows as a parent. But Woody — who has raised two beautiful girls with Soon Yi, recalls of Mia’s parenting :

“When Satchel was born, things took an even darker quantum leap. From his birth, Mia expropriated Satchel. She took him into her bedroom, her bed, and insisted on breast-feeding him. She kept telling me she intended to do it for years, and that anthropological studies have shown positive results from tribes where breast-feeding goes on much longer than on the Upper West Side. Years later, two very professional and perceptive women who worked in Mia’s house, Sandy Boluch and Judy Hollister, the first as babysitter and the second as housekeeper, described numerous incidents. Sandy reports seeing Mia sometimes sleeping in the nude with Satchel (now Ronan) a number of times till he was eleven years old. I don’t know what the anthropologists would say about that, but I can imagine what the guys in the poolroom would say.”

Ronan, who was named Satchel at birth, was five when Woody and Mia’s split came.His sister, Dylan was 7. After the public scandal and custody hearings, Woody was separated from the children for good. He writes:

When she [Dylan] got a little older and I imagined she would realize how she was being used, I wrote her, just sweet, affectionate, brief letters asking how she was doing. No commercials for me. The letters were all intercepted by Ronan and I received curt, evasive answers that began, “I told Dylan about your letter and she is not interested.”

I finally wrote Satchel and said, “Do you always open your sister’s mail and read it?” No answer except he wrote back that if I really wanted to help out, I should send money.I already was supporting them generously by law, but if Mia was right about Satchel being the son of Frank Sinatra, then I was really being bilked.”

More Russian conspiracies

Poor, sweet innocent American who was filmed urinating on an Afghan he killed.

Obviously the claim that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill US troops is crap. 

In any case, far more Americans are killed by police than by the Taliban and since the conspiracy theorists also claim that Russia is the sinister force behind Black Lives Matter, Russian conspiracies are working at cross purposes. Do they want to kill us or stop the killing? Russian conspiracies are a huge net gain for Americans as far as not being killed goes. 

Salesman, 1969

My mother wanted to watch a movie last night so I turned on Albert and David Maysles' cinema verite film Salesman on the Criterion Channel.

I found the movie deeply depressing when I watched it before. I heard that audiences were left crying in the theaters when it was first shown. About door-to-door Bible salesman. They sold lavishly illustrated Catholic Bibles for the equivalent of over $350 in today's money. They were trying to sell them to working class people.

The salesman were pitiful. They had a terrible job, trying to sell something people had no need for. The salesmen shared motel rooms, all dressed in suits, never looking relaxed. The movie focuses on Paul who is failing badly.

But my mother and I were mostly laughing as we watched.

Whenever I go into a church, I'm always surprised at how religious it is. I assume people go to church largely for social reasons. They must serve other social functions or no one would go. Karl Marx took his children to church for the music. There are people who say they're "spiritual but not religious". The customers in this movie struck me as being religious but not spiritual. But they were prepared to spend money they didn't have on it, willing to buy a bible on credit.

The movie made white ethnicity seem a lot less appealing. They would talk about the Irish and the Italians. They had a Polish buyer in one scene. It just seemed depressing. The movie focused on Paul who was Irish and tried to use that, but in the motel room, he would slip into an Irish-American accent and do impressions of his relatives.

It's a little like the trailer for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The announcer tells you to see the movie "for your own protection", like it will teach you how to guard against big violent women.

In this movie, you can see right through every sales technique and thus be prepared for them. Long before anyone has decided to buy, they ask which color they would prefer and which payment plan would be best for them. They seem like nice guys who love talking to you, but as soon as they get their check or realize you're not buying, they're out of there. We see Paul getting payment out of a woman who had changed her mind. She and her husband decided they couldn't afford it. He tells her he's the district manager and will have to fine the salesman she talked to if he doesn't get payment. He claims they already sent in the order. She suggests he come back when her husband is there and he tells her he couldn't possibly.

Well, if you're going to be pitiful, you may as well be overbearing, too.

I said something about how pitiful they were, but my mother said they were just like nine tenths of the people out there.

Turns out this post is movie-related

Squirt guns were like Smart Phones back then.

This is a letter to the editor of my junior high school newspaper. It was from 1969, several years before I went there. I thought it was in somewhat bad taste, making light of two assassinations although it did balance out the "right to keep and bear arms" stuff.

The school did have a "Rifle Club" at the time.

This was on the school website that also posted old yearbooks. I thought I could find a picture of the writer of this letter, but the yearbook that year ran everyone's picture but not their names.

I looked at the year book from the following year and it did have the kids' names, but the author of the letter had moved on by then. But I did notice a picture of then-future musician Dan Siegel who went on to compose the music for the movie Reform School Girls (1986).