The old gothic soap opera aimed at the after school crowd. My sister had a friend who would rush home from school to watch it. I watched some episodes when I was four or five. It took me some time before I could distinguish between it, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.
It gave me the impression that ALL soap operas were horror stories. I'd turn on The Secret Storm and shudder in fear. All the scenes were indoors and they saved money by not having widows showing the weather outside, so I assume all the episodes took place during a massive, terrifying storm.
It turns out there's a Dark Shadows channel on Pluto, the streaming video channel. Dark Shadows was on five days a week and is the only soap opera where nearly all the episodes were preserved.
Filmed like other soaps were in those days. Video tape was edited by cutting and splicing the tape. It was probably harder than editing film. So they filmed the thing "live on tape". They would perform each episode as if it were a live TV show. There were flubbed lines in every episode and you could see actors struggling to remember their lines. Sometimes a camera would pan too far or not move in close enough and you could see past the edge of the set.
And, like other soaps in those days, nearly every scene was a long conversation between just two actors. It's like an Eric Rohmer movie if Eric Rohmer had been a much simpler man.
An early episode is on as I write this. Dennis Patrick is heavily featured just a few years before he played the murderous bourgeois father in Joe with Peter Boyle and about ten years before he was on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
I've never felt any sympathy for war criminals including the ones from this country. For example, the soldier who interrupted his lunch to shoot a baby that had crawled out of a ditch at Mi Lai. I've had people enraged at me for saying this.
The Thick-Walled Room was based on the writings of B- and C-class Japanese war criminals, which may have been a mistake since the movie is more sympathetic to them than to the victims of Japanese atrocities. There are only a couple flashbacks to the crimes they committed. One killed a man who fed a group of Japanese soldiers. Another used a man tied to a tree for bayonet practice.
A prisoner's Communist brother visits him. He had himself been jailed for his opposition to the Korean War. His brother was a war criminal---he was a peace criminal. He argues that low level war criminals got harsher sentences than the ones who gave the orders. The U.S. keeps war criminals locked up even as they try to re-militarize Japan.
There was this one thing that made me think of those of us sheltering in place from Covid-19. The prisoner tells his brother, "At first I thought by staying in here, we'd become more pure and spiritual. As it turns out, the opposite is true."
The American guards seemed to be played by Japanese. A few were either in really convincing white face or were non-English speaking whites doing their lines phonetically. In one scene, an American guard sings "My Darling Clementine" while the prisoners work. In another scene, one sings "Camptown Races".
Some prisoner sneak into the execution chamber to get a look at the gallows. "I heard Tojo forgot to say 'Long live the Emperor'."
There are three comments on this movie on IMDb and they're all pro-war criminal.
An apolitical British ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) is hired to write a former British Prime Minister's autobiography. The former Prime Minster (Pierce Brosnan) is in the United States. It turns out he's under investigation by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. He's advised not to go to any country that recognizes the jurisdiction of the ICC. The only countries that don't recognize it are the United States, Iraq, Indonesia, North Korea and, of course, Israel.
The man can't step foot outside the country without being arrested. Remind you of anybody?
Like a lot of Polanski movies, this one is set in the United States and Britain, two countries he can't visit. I don't know if they have a large supply of American cars, double decker buses and English taxis in France or that was all second unit work. IMDb shows they had units in the U.S. and Britain.
Seems like this might be a good idea for other directors dreaming of careers in Hollywood. You can stay in your own country, have a simulated Hollywood career and probably save a fortune.
For that matter, there are regional filmmakers in the United States who wish they could be in New York or Hollywood. There's no place in their small town that couldn't pass for the big city if the shot was framed just right?
Skidmore, Missouri, pop. 284, but it could be anywhere, really.
A political thriller. The previous ghost writer died mysteriously and now they're after Ewan McGregor, too.
I was surprised to see the late Eli Wallach looking healthy at age 95. With Jim Belushi in a small role.
I heard this was Fassbinder's thing, using storylines from old Hollywood movies. In Chinese Roulette, a husband and wife lie to each other about where they're going for the weekend and both show up at their summer house---their summer mansion---with their lovers. Seems like I've seen this before in movies and on TV but I can't think of where.
I've always wondered what household servants are supposed to do under these circumstances. Do you butt out and let people do what they want, or should you mention it to the one signing your paycheck? In this case, the housekeeper is a horrible person who laughs at the couple's disabled daughter.
The tweenage daughter shows up with at with a mute servant and a selection of dolls. It wasn't clear to me how, but she was somehow responsible for this awkward situation.
They play a game called "Chinese Roulette". I don't know if it's a real thing or something they made up for the movie, but there are two teams, and they ask questions like, "If this person were a tree, what kind of tree would it be", and you're supposed to guess who the person is--one of the people present--based on that. I didn't really understand what they were doing until the end.
I would have been in over my head with these people. I'd have had no idea what was going on or what they were talking about. Yet, I would have felt vastly superior to each of them.
Has it really been ten years? They mention this in the movie. Odysseus took ten years to get where it was he was going, and it was ten years ago that they made the first The Trip TV series edited into a feature film.
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon go on a tour of restaurants and write about the food. They do a lot of impressions.
I don't know how I feel about it. It's food I would never eat and all the driving looks exhausting.
They refer to the movies Coogan has appeared in, The Dinner (2017) with Richard Gere and Stan and Ollie (2018). Coogan reads a review on his smart phone praising his performance. He played Stan Laurel as likable, it said, even though Coogan himself is "a self-regarding ass".
I googled it. It was real, a review from The Independent.
Rob Brydon's a nice again in this one and Steve Coogan is less annoyed and actually amused by him.
I don't know if Coogan and Brydon did their own stunts. They didn't mention stunt doubles on IMDb. There was some diving and they swim way out there. They seem like regular guys, but they're better than us both physically and intellectually.
I watched a documentary I had seen years ago about the great B movie director Edgar Ulmer. They spoke with directors Peter Bogdanovich, John Landis, Joe Dante, Win Winders, Roger Corman and actors who worked with Ulmer, John Saxon, Jimmy Lydon, William Shallert and Peter Marshall.
I wrote about this documentary before a few years ago and thought it was strange and disturbing that they talked about him as a tragic figure in film. He has 57 directing credits, made dozens of B movies, mostly for PRC, the most impoverished of the poverty row studios. He's best known for directing Detour. But he was still seen as a pitiable failure because his movies were low budget.
Maybe they should have gone the other direction. Instead of these big shot directors, they should have interviewed people who worked in television or low budget movies, people who would have seen his career as an inspiration instead of a pathetic sob story.
I especially could have done without John Landis who had nothing interesting to say, smiled constantly and is a murderer.
Ulmer's daughter was a producer the documentary, so I don't think they went into this, but Ulmer was on his way to directing "A" pictures at Universal when it became known that he was sleeping with Shirley Kassler, the wife of producer Max Alexander who was the nephew of Universal president Carl Laemmle. Kassler divorced Alexander and married Ulmer the same year.
I saw this movie at the university long, long ago. I had no idea who Melville was. I hadn't given any thought to the existence of French gangsters and I knew nothing about French gangster movies. The movie seemed extremely old to me, but it had been made less than fifteen years earlier.
Are gangsters really that interesting? I think of John Gotti, a moron who sat in prison making plans to bribe the President of the United States to grant him a pardon. There was video of him browbeating his son who came to visit for saying he wanted to be a baseball player when he grew up. Gotti ordered him to want to be a lawyer.
There was a reality show a few years later that made it clear that no one in that family was capable of anything resembling intellectual activity.
This movie starts with some aging French gangsters escaping from prison and jumping on a moving train.
Turns into an honor among thieves story as these things do.
I was drawn to the movie by the photocopied flier. It had a picture of a French geezer in a trench coat with a .45 one hand and a Luger in the other. It was from a scene near the end of the movie.
Two things stood out to me. One was that Dodge Darts were considered chic in Europe. The other was a scene that was pretty good. Don't read this if you don't want me to ruin it for you.
A French criminal rents a room. He places a gun out of sight on a high shelf. Then he stands next to it and practices reaching up behind him, grabbing the gun and holding it on whoever might show up.
Then he goes out. Probably to buy cheese.
While he's gone, some rival criminals enter his room. They quickly search it and find his hidden gun which they take. Then they sit down and wait.
The guy comes back. Finds these guys sitting there. As he speaks to them, he causally saunters over to the shelf where he hid his gun. They have a tense conversation. There is greater and greater suspense as we wait for him to reach for his gun that isn't there.
It's an outrage. Innocent Lori Loughlin was sentenced to two months in prison for the "crime" of tricking a private "university" into taking her money. Her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, was sentenced to FIVE months apparently because he was Latino and had foreign-born parents.
The judge, 82-year-old Nathaniel M. Gorton, was a corporate lawyer nominated to The United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts by serial groper George H.W. Bush.
Lori and Mossimo have 90 days to report to prison.
The judge mincing into court. He thinks he's so big.
Science fiction thriller. People in a small Brazilian town discover that their village has vanished from online maps, their cell phone service is gone and a flying saucer shaped drone is hovering around the town.
Turns out American tourists are there to have fun hunting the people of the town.
One of them kills a child who was out in the dark with a flashlight, "WHICH I THOUGHT WAS A GUN," the killer says when one of them objects. He must have been a cop.
And you know how Americans are outraged at, say, Saddam Hussein because "He killed his OWN PEOPLE" as if it wouldn't have been a problem if he had been killing citizens of a different country? They do that in this movie, insisting that they're morally superior to the Brazilians working for them.
It's refreshing to see a movie that's this anti-American for once. There've been Hollywood movies that are critical of the United States, but they always cop out.
Cute, shallow, curly-haired semi-gay delinquent Carlitos and his semi-boyfriend spiral into a life of crime in early 1970's Argentina. They drive old American and European cars. Carlitos shoots people freely but not an absurd number of them.
The movie looked nice, everything nicely lit. It makes Buenos Aires look like a perfectly pleasant place to live except for the police and the serial killers.
The movie begins with this awful kid burglarizing a house. He soon befriends a good-looking classmate who has fully developed sideburns even though they're in high school. His new friend, it turns out, has an ex-convict father who decides that they can make a lot of money working with the adorable psychopath.
Based on the case of Robledo Puch, now 68, the longest-serving prisoner in Argentina.
I read a couple reviews which noted how shallow Carlitos is. It's sort of the opposite of the British movie Notting Hill which puts a real effort into explaining that a movie star played by Julia Roberts has feelings and emotions in spite of the way she looks.
I'd heard about this movie for years about impoverished Japanese trying to live on an island, but I was expecting the film itself to be more rustic. It looked like a commercial movie, well-made, wide screen black & white. They didn't pretend it was anything like a documentary. The parents carry large buckets of water up a steep hillside to water their crops.
The husband slugs his wife when she spills a bucket water, but they both just seem to be going about their work.
There's a tragedy in the movie that came about because of the remoteness of the island rather than poverty.
A reporter has discovered new evidence in the Balloon Boy hoax. It seems surprising and pretty definitive. It wasn't quite what anyone thought.
I've written about Balloon Boy a couple of times here. I wrote about him in the writing group I went to before the pandemic and was surprised that no one knew what I was talking about.
In 2009, I walked in and found my mother watching the big news on TV. Several news helicopters along with police both in the air and on the ground were chasing a silvery, helium-filled flying-saucer shaped homemade balloon over Colorado somewhere. It had gotten loose and flown away from a guy's backyard and he thought his six-year-old son, Falcon, might be in it.
Falcon was dubbed "Balloon Boy".
They chased the balloon for an hour. It finally landed in a field. But there was no Balloon Boy. Had he fallen out?
No, the kid was home. He had been playing with his cars in the rafters of the garage and had fallen asleep.
The father was Richard Heene who had been an especially obnoxious husband on Wife Swap and was then trying to get his own reality show about a father and his sons who do science stuff.
A few days later, the family was being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer asked why Balloon Boy didn't come out when he heard people calling him. His father passed the question on to him. Balloon Boy replied, "You guys said we did it for the show."
Richard Heene went to jail for thirty days. His wife plead guilty to something but I don't know if she went to jail.
October last year, a reporter named Robert Sanchez did an article in 5280, Denver's mile high magazine, in which he reveals the TRUTH about the Balloon Boy caper
I just read it. It was interesting. At least to me.
It was kind of pitiful. Richard Heene wanted a reality show so bad. It was going to be his ticket out of a life of loud, over the top desperation. He's incredibly obnoxious and, I don't know if he thinks he's being funny, but he acted this way in a video of the balloon taking off, thrashing around so everyone would know how terribly upset he was that the balloon was "accidentally" released. He apparently thinks he's acting naturally.
Here he is on Wife Swap:
Ten years after the Balloon Boy incident, Robert Sanchez visited Balloon Boy and his family in Florida where they were living in a travel trailer. I read that Heene had forced Balloon Boy and his brothers to form a heavy metal band cleverly named "The Heene Boyz" and lived off their income, but the band was only a novelty while they were children. Once they were teenagers, they were just another garage band. They did a pro-Trump "song" (even though their mother is an immigrant and a convicted criminal), and a song called "Balloon Boy--No Hoax".
So, to get to the point, Sanchez interviewed Heene's lawyer who gave him a large box of materials on the case. One item amidst the hundreds of pages was statement handwritten by Heene's wife, Mayumi. She's Japanese, hence the mistakes in English. From the article:
The following 12 pages appeared to have been created for her attorney, a blow-by-blow of the event. The first entry was dated April 27, 2009. The production company had gotten five rejections on the reality show over five months. “What could we do to help them?” Mayumi wrote. “They wouldn’t put up money, but we can do our own project…. Then they can make a ‘one-off’ out of it.”
For September 30, Mayumi wrote: “Richard redesigned flying saucer many times. He started 30 feet. He called around to see if it’s feedable [sic], but he found it away [sic] expensive. Also he found it wouldn’t fit in our back yard.”
October 1: “Richard made a shop list.” [Did she mean shot list?]
October 2: “We shot intro of this project on the couch with kids.”
October 3: “We started building a flying saucer and shooting the process inside of the house because it was snowing.”
Then things get weird.
October 6: “We have a video of Falcon saying, ‘I want to get inside of it.’ ”
October 14: “At night, Richard asked me to remember about the story of ‘Lawnchair Larry,’ then Richard mentioned what if Falcon hid for ½ hours later and landed, then mention in [news]paper, Fort Collins…. Falcon can hide in the closet with a safe in the basement.”
October 15: “To my understanding, we’re never going to launch the flying saucer because the strong wind changed our mind. Because of the wind, it might crash on somebody, cars or anything…. Richard said we would do the third test and quit. That’s why I thought he was acting so strange. After the flying saucer went off, he went so hysterical. Because he started so hysterical, I started taking it seriously. After it was launched, we did not know whether Falcon was in the flying saucer or in the house or anywhere.”
October 18: “I found out when we visited our attorney’s [sic] that Richard revealed he came down to the basement to look for Falcon, but he wasn’t there. Richard thought really Falcon would be in the flying saucer.”
The notes explained everything. Here it was in black and white: For all the times Richard had claimed everyone had the story wrong, for all the tall tales he told me, Mayumi’s notes showed a motive and a plan.
It’s not difficult to piece it together: With a video camera rolling, Richard would launch the balloon and freak out. He’d call the FAA and get the balloon tracked. There’d be a tearful reunion when Falcon emerged from the basement, where he’d been told to hide.
Richard would call back and say his son wasn’t in the basket. They’d make sure the Fort Collins newspaper knew about the stray saucer and the drama behind it. The story might go nationwide. With publicity in full force and a recording of every moment, networks would fight over the Heenes’ story.
Except Falcon didn’t hide where he was told to. He hid in the garage attic, not in the basement. He played with his cars and he fell asleep. The FAA said Richard needed to call 911. Deputies showed up. Neighbors began searching for Falcon. And then that silvery balloon was careening across our television screens. That’s why Mayumi’s reunion with Falcon was so believable: For a few hours, she and Richard honestly worried their son had been swept away.
Sanchez called Heene and asked about this.
He fumbled for words when I explained what I’d found. He wanted to know where I’d gotten the notes and if he could see them. I could hear Mayumi in the background, denying to her husband that she’d written anything. I emailed photos of the notes to Richard, and he asked if he could call back the next day.
It was a couple of days before they spoke again, then his wife admitted she wrote it but it had all been a lie. Heene did that thing where he acts like an idiot and actually thinks it will fool the reporter.
There was a brief back-and-forth. Mayumi continued to cry. It was difficult to understand what she was saying. Richard yelled some more. The moment reminded me of the video the Heenes made of their balloon floating away, when Richard yelled at Mayumi and kicked the wooden launch pad. According to Mayumi’s notes, all of that had been an elaborate ruse. Now, it appeared, they were doing it again, this time for an audience of one.
Heene's not getting a reality show. He's getting old. There's only one thing left for him and he needs to do it quick before people forget about him completely. He needs to write a book. Admit to everything. He HAS to admit to everything or it won't be long enough. He already pled guilty. They can't do anything to him now. He's paid his debt to society. Now society can pay HIM a few bucks.
He'd rather clutch at straws than pick up the pile of money practically lying at his feet.
I should feel more sorry for Richard Jewell. All he ever wanted was to be a cop, a pretty modest goal but one he wasn't suited for. But then again, Paul Walter Hauser isn't what you picture as a movie star, yet there he is in the title role.
One review seemed to suggest the movie was a Clint Eastwood Republican thing now that Democrats have taken to worshipping the FBI. Richard Jewell is an authoritarian personality, pushing college kids around when he works as campus security then groveling when federal law enforcement starts persecuting him. We never see him interact with Blacks, Latinos, homeless or poor people or protestors.
Several years ago, the lapdog press was chuckling over the possibility of a terrorist attack at the Sochi Olympics in Russia. They forgot about the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta and the government's botched investigation.
Personal Problems, in two volumes. Shot on U-Matic video for $40 thousand in 1980, a series of long dialog scenes. Ishmael Reed who came up with the original idea as a radio drama broadcast on NPR.
“Not a single weapon is pulled. That alone makes it an unusual black film,” said Reed, 80, in a recent interview.
In fact, it’s the ordinariness of the two-part, nearly three-hour “meta-soap opera” that makes it revolutionary, said Reed, the renowned and iconoclastic Oakland playwright-poet-novelist who has been a critic of political oppression and inequality for decades.
In one scene, a 17-year-old who's obviously in pain answers a long, long series of questions before he can be admitted to an emergency room.
A husband tells his wife over breakfast that he's going to meet with a friend, Rabbit, about a business deal. She mentions Raisin in the Sun as a cautionary tale. He's never heard of it and thinks she means Uptown Saturday Night. His father (Jim Wright, Souls of Sin, 1949) thinks it was Cabin in the Sky.
Directed by Bill Gunn.
Johnnie Mae and her cohort are not enslaved, drug-addicted, menacing or exceptional, said Reed, who has been openly critical of Hollywood successes like “The Color Purple,” “Precious” and “The Wire” for accentuating the negative or being “told by outsiders.”
“I’ve lived in inner-city Oakland since 1979,” he said. “Johnnie Mae and Charles, they’re like every black couple in my neighborhood, people with jobs. Some kids on the block ended up with ankle bracelets, but many more went to college. It’s just that the crack houses are the ones that normally get the media attention.”
Available on The Criterion Channel.
U-Matic video didn't look bad. Why did people use VHS?
Short film about a struggling model in New York looking for work while recovering from an accident. A lot of nudity for a short film.
I read a book on how to earn a living as an actor outside of New York and Hollywood, and it sounded pretty good. The author worked in Atlanta appearing mostly in TV commercials. When he moved to New York, he discovered that the pay per job was about the same, but he found more work in Atlanta and the cost of living was lower.
I assume it's about the same for models. She should try to find work in a market that's not hopelessly glutted.
Interesting how much things have changed. The economy must have been really good back then because it was about the shame of being 23-years-old and still living with your parents.
Peter's parents have an indoor pool. Who can blame him for staying? He doesn't work and doesn't want to. He tells us in voiceover that he copes with loneliness by becoming two people, the person he really is and the other a person he pretends to be.
Peter and his parents go into therapy. He learns about another family, an older Armenian couple who've alienated their adult daughter. They had given a son up for adoption years earlier. Peter goes away on vacation by himself. The therapist thinks this would be good for him. He calls the Armenian family and tells them he's the son they gave up.
That's another thing that's changed. DNA testing.
The Armenian family isn't especially warm. The father tried to strangle the therapist during a roleplaying session, but his volatility doesn't play much role in the story. They were more intense than Peter's Canadian WASP parents, but that novelty would wear off.
I can't see how Peter moving in with them was an improvement for anyone.
Directed by Sara Driver, from a short story by Paul Bowles. I rented this on VHS in the '80's and didn't realize how recently it had been made then. I assume the title is grammatically correct although I wouldn't have guessed it.
A patient puts on the shoes and coat of an accident victim and wanders away from a mental hospital after a fiery milti-car accident outside the fence.
The narration seemed hypnotic in part because I got up at 5:00 after a four hours sleep so I could go shopping and avoid the crowds and the coronavirus.
Black and white, written by Driver and Jim Jarmusch. Jarmusch did the cinematography.
The burning cars, the firefighters and the emergency vehicles must have been the major expenses.
"It's an R-rated movie made in Denmark," I said. "What did you expect?"
My mother wanted to see a movie my sister-in-law recommended. She watched some of it and turned it off and complained about a graphic sex scene. Does a couple's wedding night really need to be dramatized? In some cases it does, but we can usually guess at it.
My mother liked the movie Midnight Run and now wants to watch Robert De Niro in everything. She asked if Taxi Driver was good.
"You wouldn't like it," I said.
I remember back when my grandparents were offended by Kramer vs Kramer, and I tended to agree with them. I don't want to listen to Dustin Hoffman going to the bathroom. If was less offensive when the kid did it, but I don't want to hear that, either.
My aunt thought about recommending E.T. to them as an inoffensive G-rated movie, but she hesitated because of the use of the term "penis breath".
I knew this middle aged couple who sent the husband's elderly mother into the basement to watch a highly regarded but mostly plotless movie about a gypsies in New York. They didn't watch it with her. I don't know if they were actually surprised that she either didn't understand it, or didn't realize that there was little to understand.
My grandmother was born in the 1890's. My cousin took her to see Bonnie & Clyde and was offended when she didn't care for it. My sister later took her to an early '70's sex comedy and was surprised that she didn't find it hilarious.
Our grandmother, meanwhile, thought that her brothers and son who survived the horrors of World Wars One and Two should have been more open to the Civil War epic Gone with the Wind.
I saw a man and his 5-year-old leave an arthouse theater in Cambridge. Not surprisingly, the kid was frightened by Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. I was at Enter the Dragon once. I heard a child in the audience say, "What's that noise?" The child's mother said cheerily, "That's the sound of the bones breaking."
I knew a tough, foul-mouthed, streetwise 12-year-old who was upset when his friend's father took them to Conan the Barbarian. He said it would have been fine with less violence.
When I was eighteen, my friends and I were concerned about another friend's 14-year-old brother watching The Exorcist with us. He was insulted. He watched it with us and we kept laughing at it, so that took the edge off.
So. I guess the point here is that nobody cares if a movie is "good". There are other matters to take into consideration.
I was at a video store one time. There were these two middle school boys. They were talking about literature. They were shockingly well-read. And they picked out a couple of Disney movies.
I hadn't heard of the Rifftrax version. Just came across the real version somewhere on Amazon Prime.
Variety's review of Roger Corman's 1956 movie, Swamp Women, praised it for its title but not much else.
I'm afraid I feel the same about this Swamp Boy movie. A Mexican production filmed mostly in the Everglades. A pre-teen lives with his fugitive grandfather in a hut. They really want to kill a puma that's walking around out there but they have muzzle-loading rifles so they'd only get one shot, and apparently the puma understands this and would attack them while they were reloading.
The movie was pretty dull. Didn't have enough plot. You'd think a swamp boy movie would be more interesting.
They hunt for alligators, they want to kill that puma. They don't even try to explain why they have a chimpanzee. There's quicksand. We see grandpa kill a man in flashback.
I kept thinking the kid's grandfather was calling him "Cindy".
The movie critic Judith Crist wrote about a screenwriter she knew. He said he was writing a World War Two movie, but this movie would be different. In his script, the Nazis were bad.
There was a long period where Hollywood movies about World War Two presented Germans as secretly anti-Nazi, talking privately about their hatred for Hitler but still fighting the war out of simple patriotism.
One of the more repellent examples was The Eagle Has Landed. Michael Caine plays an English-speaking Nazi who leads a band of Germans on a mission to kidnap Winston Churchill. In an early scene, Caine rescues a Jewish girl from some less virtuous Nazis.
I don't know that Jojo Rabbit was much better. They loved Hitler and hated Jews in a cartoonish way, but the Nazis were either nice or ineffectual or adorable. It was the U.S. that firebombed Dresden, but in the end, the movie made the Soviets the villains. All the Soviets did was fight the Nazi Army. They were killed by the tens of millions. At least 40% of Soviet troops taken prisoner by the Germans died.
Make it a double feature. Watch it with Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood or Klimov's Come and See, both movies about boys in World War Two.
On further reflection, maybe The Tin Drum would be a more fitting second feature.
I never understood why Baywatch was so popular in Europe. Don't people walk around naked on beaches there? Maybe people in swimwear was a nice change.
Year of the Jellyfish is a surprisingly dreary French movie about nude and semi-nude French women vacationers. It was popular in France in its day. Seeing it in movie form was probably better than having to walk around on a beach in the sun and the heat.
Come to think of it, I didn't like The Sun Also Rises because it was about people hanging around on vacation. The stakes seemed really low.
An eighteen-year-old has been impregnated by a middle-aged family friend. Her mother is sleeping with a guy who gets girls for rich men. They lounge around on the beach and take their clothes off all the time.
It does pick up at the end.
Might make a good double feature with Death in Venice or Mr Hulot's Holiday depending on your mood.
I don't know if it's just my family. We were hanging around. The TV was on with the sound turned down. I put it on Jaws: The Revenge, a notoriously bad movie, but it was perfectly pleasant. There wasn't anything disturbing or upsetting and I was amused by it.
But my sister saw that Jaws was coming on next and she wanted to watch it. I've seen it several times and don't need to see it again. I really didn't want to watch the horrible bloody death of a child and I didn't want to see adults die, either. But she acted like I was some kind of tasteless monster for watching one movie but not wanting to see the other.
Does liking a movie or thinking it's "good" mean it's appropriate for every occasion?
I've gone through this with my mother wanting to see Judgement at Nuremberg. We all had to watch it on Xmas several years ago. I really don't like watching concentration camp documentary footage and I didn't like Burt Lancaster as a "good" Nazi who didn't want Maximilian Schell needling a witness.
I tried to get my mother to watch Downfall. I told her what it was about and that it had lots of Nazis committing suicide, something I'm happy to see, but she didn't want to watch it.
Did I misjudge the weird appeal Dylan Farrow has with people who couldn't possibly know anything about her? It would explain a lot.
There are "reviews" of Farrow's young adult novel on a site called Goodreads. One of them simply says, "When Dylan Farrow publishes a YA fantasy, you read it."
An excerpt from another review consisting mostly of animated gifs by someone who hasn't read the book:
COUNT ME IN FOR ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING BY DYLAN FARROW. If her writing is as good as her brother's (the perfection that is Ronan Farrow), this is going to blow my mind. AND IT'S DYSTOPIAN TOO LIKE YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS GIRL.
These were obviously written by girls in Farrow's target audience. It's stupid to criticize them. But how do they have any idea who she is?
There were a few critical reviews questioning, among other things, why she wrote the book in the present tense.
...I’m so confused as to how this a “feminist fantasy.” It isn’t. Not at all. Among other things, the heroine is literally saved by a male character in the end.
...
...Then bang ... we hit a wall of storytelling in the present tense, an account with so little tension, zero dynamic characters, and voice with no charisma, that I was out. I slogged through the rest because I wanted to write a fair review. By the end, I wasn’t any more invested. The MC is whiny, selfish, directionless, and too moony-eyed over boys to be any sort of female/feminist role model...
Jeanne, a young French woman, humiliates herself in a job interview, her boyfriend is stabbed, the police threaten her because the guy she works for turns out to be a criminal. So she draws a swastika on her stomach, gives herself a couple of superficial knife wounds and implausibly claims to have been attacked by non-descript anti-Semites on the subway who mistakenly thought she was Jewish because they found a Jewish lawyer's business card in her purse.
The movie has a kid getting geared up for his bar mitzvah. His parents are divorced and sort of hate each other and they're both annoyed with him. Makes those books about French child-rearing seem less appealing. His grandfather is the Jewish lawyer whose business card the girl claimed she had. The girl's bad job interview was at his office where she was interviewed by the kid's mother. The girl's mother encouraged her to apply because she used to know the lawyer.
All the connections between the characters saved money by keeping the number of cast members down. The lawyer also specialized in anti-Semitism cases. The cops investigating the boyfriend's stabbing also investigated the alleged anti-Semitic attack.
I'll give away the ending:
The lawyer, it turns out, saw right through the story. In fact, the 13-year-old boy saw right through it, too, and convinced Jeanne to tell them the truth. The lawyer didn't care. He's not the police. It's not his job to expose her. He doesn't understand how the cops fell for such an obvious hoax.
Jeanne's embarrassment didn't seem as acute as I'm making it out to be. She wasn't Jan in a Brady Bunch episode. She seemed at ease with the job interview since she knew she wasn't qualified for the job in the first place.
The poor girl just wanted to rollerblade around Paris. She didn't want to work. I don't think she wanted a boyfriend. Her mother insisted she apply for the job. Everything that happened happened because people wouldn't leave her alone.
Wilford Brimley has died at 85. I don't know how he felt about playing one of the old people in Cocoon when he was in his 40's, but that was what made him a success.
Brimley was in the old family drama Our House which I was aware of but didn't watch. When I did see it, I was surprised that he played such a gruff character. I was flipping through the channels and stopped to watch a few seconds of an episode. Brimley was trying to intimidate a young man by telling him the battle he was in when he was his age during World War Two. I would have assumed that his wartime experiences left him a physical and emotional wreck and that you'd better not provoke him or you might have to sit with him until an ambulance or social workers arrived.
His first credited role was in The China Syndrome. Say what you will about the oatmeal commercials, he was in some pretty good or at least well-received movies.
