Proud to be an American

Donald Trump has been accusing Biden of taking drugs. My guess is that Trump thought he was fighting fire with fire by getting hopped up on Adderall before the debate. People who worked on his TV show said he would grind up Adderall and snort it like cocaine and it would turn him into an even bigger jackass than usual.

I don't know if Biden won, exactly, but Trump definitely lost. 

There was a time when they would claim that the challenger benefited from a debate because just appearing on stage with the president made them look more presidential. And that was the case here but not for the reason they were thinking.

Afterschool (2008)

 

I know it's not their fault they have to wear ties and blazers. I don't hold that against them. But I've always had mixed feelings about wealthy prep school students.

Cute but unhappy Ezra Miller is a boarder at a co-ed prep school. He watches a lot of degrading, violent porn and morbid internet videos. I averted my eyes for some of it. I don't want to see some kid fall off his bike and hit the pavement face first or Saddam Hussein's execution. Why should I be traumatized, too?

Ezra joins the AV club. He's filming something when he captures two twin girls, co-eds at the school, overcome by cocaine that turns out to have been laced with rat poison. He's of no real help to them but he appears to comfort one of them as she lay dying.

Everyone sympathizes with the poor boy who had to have been traumatized. It turns out all those videos he's been watching prepared him for it, but in a really awful way.

And he'll probably get into Princeton.

Lured, 1947, Douglas Sirk

 

I don't know. It was a little dull considering everything. 

Scotland Yard uses Lucille Ball as bait to catch a serial strangler who gets his victims through personal ads. She becomes engaged to rich guy George Sanders then begins to suspect HE's the killer. Police interrogate him and they seem convinced. He keeps confessing sarcastically which you really shouldn't do. 

Directed by Douglas Sirk. I watched it on the Criterion Channel because it ends on the 30th. Don't know where you can see it after that.

Nocturama (France, 2016)

 

Cute French teens with different ethnic backgrounds carry out a series of simultaneous bombings in Paris.  A couple of them shoot some people, too. It's not clear what their motive is. The kids, most of them, then hide out all night in a French department store. 

You know how, in Psycho, the audience presumably wanted the murderer caught, but when Anthony Perkins starts cleaning up the crime scene, viewers find themselves watching carefully hoping he doesn't miss anything? It was kind of like that here. The youngsters start trying on clothes, playing with items from the toy department and eating the food. I kept worrying they were going to get themselves caught.

I thought this might be the one French movie which, in spite of the subject matter, wouldn't make France look like a hellhole. I was wrong once again.

--SPOILER ALERT--

The movie ends with a French SWAT team moving in. According to the TV's they were watching, the French government announced that they were "enemies of the state" and there would be "no negotiations". So the police simply murder each teen as they put their hands up and try to surrender. The police look at them for a second, then shoot each one. 

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Making Time (2020)

 

I was reading a book on script writing for low budget features. The author wrote made-for-cable TV movies to be shot in 12 or 18 days, but he mentioned there were companies that made 3-day movies that were mostly unwatchable. I tried to find more information on them, so I googled "three day movie", but all I got was dozens of websites about a movie called The Next Three Days.

But I finally found a podcast interview with a fellow named Grant Pichla who made a movie in two days. He filmed 60 pages of script in one day. They had to dispense with rehearsals and, after the first scene, with pretty much any direction or discussion at all. 

The guy is a film school grad who earns at least part of his living shooting wedding videos, and was doing pretty well judging from his house in a Detroit suburb where the thing was filmed.

Turned out to be available on Amazon Prime. And it was pretty good. It looked great. The CIA wants to buy a guy's time machine, but he has to prove that it works, so he and an agent go back seven years to the night he has to propose to his estranged wife who just served him with divorce papers.

An hour and forty-eight minutes. They didn't pad it out by running the closing credits really slow. They didn't even pad out the credits with phony names like they usually do with these things. They thanked the Screen Actors Guild in the closing credits.

Magic, 1978

 

They had to change the TV ad for this movie because it was frightening children. 

 

Seems like there were a number of movies like this back then, suprisingly respectable horror/thrillers. I don't know if they existed ten years later.

 

Anthony Hopkins plays Corky, a magician and ventriloquist who becomes more and more unhinged. 

 

Hopkins is the only guest in an isolated lakeside hotel run by Ann-Margret. His agent, Burgess Meredith, arrives and finds Hopkins in a fierce argument with his dummy, Fats. When he leaves to get Hopkins psychiatric help things take a turn for the worse. Burgess Meredith, looking dignified without his wig, plays a stronger character than usual. 

  

Directed by Richard Attenborough. With Ed Lauter, David Ogden Stiers and Jerry Houser.

 

Available on HBO.

Someone else's thoughts about Diving Bell and the Butterfly

 

 

I keep seeing pandemic stuff. Things oddly analogous. People with the idea that sheltering in place or being under quarantine will be some sort of boon to them creatively or in some other way.

And here's another. I haven't seen it, but from A.S. Hamrah writing about Oscar nominees for whatever year this was:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

When I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly at BAM, in Brooklyn, it was easy to see why it resonated with the local crowd. The subject of this movie is: if only I were paralyzed from head to toe and could only move one eye, then finally I’d be able to finish that book I’ve been meaning to write.

...

Which is not to say that I didn’t like it. I did like it. For those reasons.

45 minutes of talking is now ideal

Then I read this by A.S. Hamrah:

...I saw The Irishman in a huge theater on a giant screen, and I did not want to get up, didn’t want it to end, and could have watched another hour of it if there was one. It seems like most everybody who watched it at home complained it was too long, redundant, and looked funny. It did not seem like entertainment to them. That was the message they sent out into the world and it reached me loud and clear. 

What does that mean? Do I have a false sense of duty to the cinema? Or have people who watch movies at home, even great ones, been trained by their quality-TV habit to want things to be bingeable in forty-five-minute chunks, easy to ignore, and better to listen to than to watch?

So I don't know if I should feel ashamed to be one of those people, or if I should take this as confirmation that I was on the right track. I guess it could be both. 

I watch 55 minute B movies and they don't leave me wanting more. I watch half hour episodes of The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents or The Rifleman and I don't wish they had stretched it out another half hour. 

Just give the public what they want, especially if it's easier to do anyway.

Edgar Ulmer's "The Amazing Transparent Man", 1960

I didn't have much time. Had to get up and go to work. So I watched this. I was surprised that as late as 1960, there were still Hollywood "B" movies that were less than an hour long.

A prison escapee is forced to submit to a scientist's invisibility experiments. The convict's only reaction to this scientific marvel is to use it to commit more crimes.

Bank employees watch impassively when his invisibility wears off during a robbery. Realistically, how else should they react?

The Violent Men, 1955

Edward G. Robinson is a big rancher on crutches driving smaller ranchers off their land. His wife, Barbara Stanwyck, is sleeping with his brother, Brian Keith. Now they're up against Glenn Ford, a Civil War veteran turned pacifist who doesn't want to fight but abruptly starts using his Civil War skills to defend his ranch.

It was pretty violent, I guess, but Glenn Ford and Edward G. Robinson end up being friends even after Ford takes him and his sulking teenage daughter hostage.

Bob Woodward vs Xi Jinping

 From Counterpunch.org:

+So Bob Woodward has known since March that Trump understood the danger COVID posed to the public health, but was lying about it publicly in order to keep the Dow and his poll numbers from falling.

+ What’s Woodward’s share of the body count?

+ On the other hand, the Associated Press obtained government documents in April showing that leaders in Beijing knew the potential scale of the COVID threat by January 14th, but Xi waited six DAYS before warning the public.

Bob Fosse's "Lenny", 1974

Lenny Bruce's delivery must have been really something because nothing he said was remotely funny.

I don't remember my reaction when I saw this movie 45 years ago. I took it as a historical drama even though Bruce died only eight years earlier. At least I went through my teen years hip to Lenny Bruce which came up two or three times over the years. It didn't help me in any way.

Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce.

As late as 1974, a movie in black & white didn't seem like that much of a novelty.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Hand of Death, 1962

I have nothing to tell you. Watching an John Agar movie. He plays a scientist who creates a serum that turns him into a murderous monster. With Joe Besser not long after he left The Three Stooges and Butch Patrick who went on to play Eddie Munster.

Someone noted that, had Night of the Living Dead been made just a year or two earlier, it would have started with a mad scientist or a Voodoo priest doing something to cause the Living Dead to walk around eating people.

It was a more innocent time. And maybe things were better then.

Look at Roger Ebert's initial review condemning of Night of the Living Dead. Back then, horror movies were considered children's films. Ebert saw it in a theater full of children and was appalled, like people who later attacked Beavis & Butt-head because they assumed all cartoons were intended for children.

Once Night of the Living Dead killed horror as a children's genre, there was nothing for kids. There were a few movies produced in Utah, like Seven Alone or The Wilderness Family, but we really had nothing. One time, my uncle took all the kids to a movie. We went to Patton.

This gave Steven Spielberg and George Lucas the opening they needed. Spielberg's friends eventually told him to stop making children's movies so he set about infantalizing the grown-ups. That brought us to the state we're in today.

Attack of the Crab Monsters (Roger Corman, 1957)

Russell Johnson about throw a grenade.

When I was about fourteen, I came across this movie on TV in the middle of the night and loved it. I still like it, but I'm not sure why. I read somewhere that it was one of Roger Corman's more successful movies in its day. He thought it was because he only left in the science fiction elements.

This was the most successful of all the early low budget horror movies. I think its success had something to do with the wildness of the title which, even I admit, is pretty off-the-wall. However, I do think a lot of its popularity had to do with the construction of the plotline. I've always believed that, in horror and science fiction films, too much time is usually spent explaining the characters in depth and developing various subplots. Genre audiences really come to these movies for their science fiction elements or their shock value. Of course they want to understand the characters and want to empathize with them all in order to share the emotions present. But they don't wish to do that at the expense of the other aspects of the picture. I talked to Chuck Griffith about this. Chuck and I worked out a general storyline before he went to work on the script. I told him, 'I don't want any scene in this picture that doesn't either end with a shock or the suspicion that a shocking event is about to take place.' And that's how the finished script read. You always had the feeling when watching the movie that something, anything was about to happen. I think this construction, plus the fact that the creature was big and ugly, won audiences.

That quote came from Wikipedia. But there's a quote in the same article from Charles Griffith saying that Corman would cut out character development anyway.

Researchers and a few sailors are on a remote island. For some reason, they have regular furnished house to stay in. Corman was into Freudian symbolism. A big hole and a radio tower are the main features on the island.

The crab monsters eat people and take over their minds. In some scenes the people hang around and talk to their dead friends who speak to them in voice over while the crabs systematically destroy and sink the island.

The giant crab monsters seem to roll around on wheels. Their legs don't really move.

I didn't realize it was only an hour long.

With Russell Johnson.

 I saw it Pub-D-Hub, a public domain streaming video channel, so I would imagine it's available elsewhere.

Empire of Passion (Japan, 1978)

Set in a Japanese village, 1895.

A rickshaw puller's daughter tells him she wants to go to school. All she wants is a good life.

"Your mother said that when she was young. She hasn't had a good life at all." He says this without sympathy or sadness and seems to think this is reason for his daughter not to have good life, either.

The guy's wife starts sleeping with a much younger man who is terrible to her. It doesn't do her any good, but he forces her to help murder her husband and dump him down a well. She tells the neighbors he's working in Tokyo. He never writes because he's illiterate.

Then his ghost starts to appear to her, picking on her and not the man who played a somewhat larger role in his death.

I had seen this movie when I was high school but didn't remember it well. The husband was pitiful but not sympathetic, the boyfriend, if you can call him that, was horrible.

There's stuff about 1890's Japan. The neighbors are sure she did something but the local constable explains that in the New Japan, he needs evidence. I don't remember what information he required before he began torturing confessions out of them.

Available on the Criterion channel.

Eating Raoul, 1982

Has it been that long? I don't know why it surprises me. I just watched Eating Raoul for the first time in 37 or 38 years. I saw it the same way I did the first time I watched it, on home video.

The film is about a couple whose apartment is full of furniture from the 1950's. They drive a battered car from the '50's. The movie is now older than the 1950's stuff was when the movie was made.

Paul Bartel and Mary Waronov star as Paul and Mary Bland. They're trying to raise money to open a restaurant and are annoyed by all the swingers who live in their apartment building. Paul accidentally kills a drunken swinger who invades their apartment and attacks his wife, they discover he has several hundred dollars in his wallet, and they begin raising money for their restaurant by luring swingers into the home and killing them.

Raoul (Robert Beltran) is a burglar who discovers their crimes and wants in on it.

It must have been pre-AIDS.

The thing I noticed about it that I somehow didn't notice back then was that much of it was filmed with hand held cameras. You don't notice it until the camera "dollies" in or out during a scene.

Paul Bartel was known, at to least to me, mainly for directing Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 which in some ways had the same flavor as this movie.

Poor Paul Bartel died at age 61 in 2000. I remember seeing him in a number of things back then and looking at IMDb, I see he had far more thriving career than I realized.

With Ed Begley, Jr, and Buck Henry.

The Spikes Gang, 1974

An American western filmed in Spain. With a small but all-American cast. It was no spaghetti western. Directed by Rickard Fleischer. With Ron Howard and Charles Martin Smith, both from American Graffiti, and Gary Grimes from Summer of '42 as naive country boys who become enamored with aging outlaw Lee Marvin who they find wounded and dying and nurse back to health.

The young fellows run away from home to become criminals, I guess. It might have been better had they been naturally bloodthirsty with a depraved indifference to human life. Someone noted somewhere that peasant revolts tend to be especially bloody. You'd think farm boys would be more brutal, shocking even hardened middle-age criminals.

But, of course, they were nice boys out playing outlaw even though they were each about twenty-years-old. Ron Howard agreed to star in Happy Days to stay out of Vietnam. They wouldn't draft you if you were on TV. Others in their age group killed millions, but they played innocent naifs in this thing.

Available on Amazon Prime.

A much better movie was Bad Company about some young fellows who set out to become criminals, one of them only wanting to dodge the draft during the Civil War.

The Bigamist, directed by Ida Lupino, 1952

Edmund O'Brien turning on the charm.

They put some thought into it. You can see how the guy ended up as a bigamist.

You know how, on sit-coms, when a couple is trying to adopt, they try to really suck up to the person from the adoption agency? Edmund O'Brien was sort of the opposite in this. He and his wife, Joan Fontaine, go to an adoption agency. He's a bit surly. He's hesitates slightly when asked to sign the form allowing them to investigate every aspect of their personal lives, but he does it. The investigator, Edmund Gwenn, finds him living in an apartment in Los Angeles with his other wife and baby.

This happens early on and it says right in the opening credits, "Edmund O'Brien as THE BIGAMIST" so I'm not giving too much away.

The story is told in flashback. Even the adoption agency guy is understanding.

He's a traveling salesman. He's away from home five days a week and he gets lonely. Out of boredom, he takes a ride on a tour bus to see the homes of the Hollywood stars. He tries to talk to a Ida Lupino, but she's just as surly as he is. They begin dating. He tries to end it and he doesn't see her for a few weeks, but when he sees her again, she's having some terrible health problem and he impulsively proposes. Then he finds that his first wife's father just died, so he couldn't very well divorce her then. And his fiance was sick so he couldn't upset her. 

It's a little slow like movies of that era tend to be. Even if he weren't a bigamist, Edmund O'Brien doesn't seem like someone who should adopt, although he was helping out a lot with his baby in his second marriage.

Caravaggio, Derek Jarman, 1986

I saw this thing in a local art house in 1986. The theater was packed. I had read something about it but didn't know what to expect and didn't quite understand it. I liked some of the anachronisms, the ones that seemed natural. Like a guy with a cigarette in his mouth working on an old motorcycle in one scene or a guy typing on a 1916 Royal typewriter which looked like something that might have existed back them.

Watching it now, the buzzcuts and the '80's hairstyles bother me more than anything else. There's a scene early of Caravaggio as a teen. An aging client chases him around the room with his pants around his ankles. The young fellow tells the man that he's an art object and that the man's gotten his money's worth. Later, he's taken in by a cardinal who apparently molests him and bankrolls him as an artist. Didn't explain where he learned to paint.

The sets were minimal, a few pieces of rustic furniture in rooms that were otherwise empty. Everything was nicely lit. Looked like the 16th century to me.

Emotionally lifeless. The only feeling I had for the characters was that I'd never want to be around any of them. But what more should I want?

Tilda Swinton does yoga. With Robbie Coltraine, Sean Bean,

Available on Fandor.

The Sheltering Sky, 1990

A wealthy couple and one of their rich friends travel to North Africa. They say they're travelers, not tourists, but they're oblivious to the dangers. They're roughing it, traveling by bus or train and hitching a ride with a young man and his domineering mother. That guy and his mother---he keeps begging for money because his mother won't give him any---really seem more on the ball than the three Americans. At least they have their own transportation.

A love triangle forms. Then thing go really, really bad. I won't give it away, but it shows the importance of not going anywhere you can't get an ambulance.

Some amazing scenery. I can see why they wanted to go. You had to go there yourself back then. You couldn't see it in the movies.

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. I don't know if he used any of the same locations Pasolini did in Oedipus Rex. Like Pasolini's movie, it has a pandemic tie-in.

Based on the 1949 novel by Paul Bowles who appears in the movie as a narrator.

Debra Winger and John Malkovich, Campbell Scott. With Jill Bennett and Timothy Spall.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Adoration, Canada, 2008

I was sleep deprived to begin with then I was watching this in the middle of the night.

A young fellow whose parents died in a car wreck claims in his high school French class that his Palestinian father tried to use his pregnant wife to smuggle a bomb on board an Israeli airliner.

A Muslim woman stops and speaks to the teen and his uncle as they put up a nativity scene in their front yard. She mentions that Muslims consider Jesus a prophet.

"Don't the Jews ALSO consider Jesus a prophet?" the kid says.

No. They don't. It's not a point against them, so it just sounds stupid to say they do.

And since she considers Jesus a prophet, a burka-clad Muslim woman shouldn't take kindly to a graven image of him.

Movie with a lot of characters who openly hate Palestinians and love Zionists. The only guy in the movie with any sympathy for Palestinians is a Nazi on the internet.

Directed by Atom Egoyan, a Canadian-Egyptian-Armenian. The Israeli government claims that the Armenian genocide was a hoax and Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews are known for spitting on Armenian priests. The guy ought to show some self-respect.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

How to Beat the High Cost of Living, 1980

I never really watched this thing. It was filmed here in Eugene, Oregon, some of it just down the street from me. Maybe seeing my own city in a movie wasn't that big a thrill when I could step outside and see the real thing, but now, 40 years later, it's fun to watch. The only movie shot in Eugene that was also set in Eugene.

When Fred Willard passed away, I wrote about the time I saw him sitting in an RV in the Taco Time parking lot. I thought he must have filmed a scene earlier at the Texaco station, but it turned out he had a scene at Taco Time that must have been filmed that evening. He sits at an outside table talking with Susan St James.

There was a scene at the Texaco across the street also filmed at night. In the background, you could see the Taco Time and a Baskin Robbins.

This was around the time that Baskin Robbins was robbed at gunpoint by a man who went on to become the I-5 Killer. I was in a class in school with the girl who worked there the night of the robbery. She didn't seem shaken by it. She told the teacher about it that morning, said something to the effect that the robber seemed like a jackass. The teacher was angry that they would have a teenage girl working alone at night, and she was right about that.

In a reverse shot, I think you can see the motel where the I-5 Killer was living.

Starring Jane Curtain, Jessica Lange and Susan St. James, with Eddie Albert, Dabney Coleman, Richard Benjamin, Art Metrano, Sybil Danning, Ronnie Schell, Cathryn Damon and Garrett Morris.

A guy I once knew slightly was listed in the closing credits. He never mentioned it. He told me he was an ordained Unitarian minister but didn't mention being in a movie.

They use payphones. In one scene, Jane Curtain's electricity has been shut off, but she's still able to use her telephone. Both these things would be impossible today.

I don't know if the plot made any sense. There was a big ball full of money in the shopping center and if you guessed how much money was in it, you'd win a prize. Three financially strapped petit bourgeois women set out to rob it.  Sort of a poor man's Fun with Dick and Jane (1977).

They keep talking about how terrible the economy is. Things actually looked pretty good back then. In the scenes in the shopping center, half the stores aren't belly up like they are now.