Irrational Man, Woody Allen, 2015

Allen's memoir went on at length about how poorly educated he was which made all the talk in the early scenes about academics and philosophy seem false and embarrassing. But once it gets past that it was pretty good.

An impotent alcoholic depressive (Joaquin Phoenix) arrives at a northeastern college where he'll be teaching philosophy. Someone tells him he needs a "muse". He starts dating a student, but it's only plotting a murder that gives him a new lease on life. He cheers up, starts eating better and his sexual dysfunction goes away.

The movie is like a cross between Strangers on a Train and another thing.

The plot twist in the third act wasn't much of a surprise. A little surprised at how he dealt with it, though.

The Traitor (Il Traditore) 2019

The true story of Sicilian mafioso Tommaso Buscetta who turns informant when a rival crime family decides to exterminate his entire extended family murdering everyone over the age of six. 

Almost any time you see someone riding in a car, you know something terrible is going to happen.

I assume the Italian courtroom scenes were accurate since it was an Italian movie, but they were the strangest I've seen. The defendants were locked in cages in the back of the courtroom where they kept shouting abuse at the witnesses who sat behind bulletproof glass. Witnesses could question and insult each other. Defendants sometimes did their own questioning. If it had been an American movie, I would have thought they made it up based entirely on crude Italian stereotypes.

Which was, to some extent, how the scenes set in the United States were done. Buscetta is in the witness protection program in the United States. Those scenes were apparently filmed in Germany, and the street scene did look like it might have been in New England. While shopping for groceries, he stops at the gun counter to buy an assault rifle. Of course, Wal-Mart does sell both guns and groceries, but they have a separate sporting goods section.

Directed by Marco Bellocchio.

Two and a half hours. I got a Starz free trial just to see it.

Eat My Dust! (1976)

Turns out to be a Halloween movie.

To impress a girl, Ron Howard steals Dave Madden's stock car and leads police on a series of high speed chases. There's no way he was insured. Howard's father is sheriff so he orders the cops not to kill him. I found the scene where they destroy a Chinese restaurant especially offensive. And was that a baby carriage he ran over? It only had a pumpkin in it, but he didn't know that.

They made a compromise on the movie poster. Ron Howard wears a Civil War cap throughout the movie. They gave him one in blue instead of the traitorous, racist, pro-slavery gray, but on the poster, they put a miscolored Confederate flag on the front.

I think it was because of the flag I that avoided watching it when it was on HBO back then, and there was just something that bothered me about Ron Howard. I came across the movie this morning on a live channel on Pluto.

Produced by Roger Corman. Written and directed by Charles B. Griffith. Howard got to direct the sequel, Grand Theft Auto. 

Free with Amazon Prime if nowhere else.

Tarzan's Secret Treasure (1941)

 

It wasn't a pandemic, certainly. Don't even know if it was an epidemic, strictly speaking, but there's a deadly infectious disease. 

Jane tells Boy about civilization, so the little fellow leaves a note saying he's running away to see it and will be back in couple of days. He's chased by a lion and he saves an African kid (Cordell Hickman) from a rampaging rhinoceros. They return to Cordell's village in time to see his mother die from an illness. The people there decide to burn Boy at the stake but Tarzan appears and saves him. Tarzan decides to adopt Cordell without checking if he has other relatives. The kid disappears by the next movie.

The rest is like the other movies in the series. An expedition of greedy whites shows up. They want the gold that's lying around Tarzan's treehouse. At least one dies of the disease and Boy is stricken as well. They think they've killed Tarzan and kidnap Jane and Boy. Tarzan goes from apparent death to Christ-like resurrection. I can't remember if he kills the people who kidnapped his wife and child. Usually he rescues them from the locals then lets them die on their own. I always thought this was a glaring weakness of the series, that and the appalling racism.

Cordell Hickman had been in Biscuit Eater before this and had smaller roles in several movies after it. His last credit on IMDb was in 1946.

Monsieur Lazhar (Canada, 2011)

When a teacher hangs herself in her classroom, an Algerian refugee, Bashir Lazhar, is hired to take over her class. The 6th graders are shaken, especially the boy who found her. He blames himself for her death. The other students blame him, too, as do, apparently, the teachers and principal.

Early on, the principal explains to Lazhar that he cannot touch the students. He can't hit them, he can't hug them, nothing. Another teacher chuckles that she used to twist kids' ears and the principal says that she used to hit her students. The teachers are resisting the urge to hurt them, not hug them.

Lazhar is the only one who was appalled that a teacher would kill herself in her classroom knowing her students would find her. Did the kid do something terrible to her, or did she do something terrible to him?

In French. It was nominated for an Oscar best foreign language film. 

Save the Tiger, 1973

Jack Lemmon and Jack Gilford own a company in the garment industry. They seem perfectly relatable except Jack Lemmon hires prostitutes for his buyers, they cheated on their taxes and look into hiring an arsonist to avoid bankruptcy and prison. They care about their employees. They committed a serious crime to keep the place open so the girls could keep working, but the arsonist points out their countless fire code violations.

I watched a person become increasingly corrupt just running a small business. Don't let it happen to you.

Lemmon won an Oscar for his performance and Jack Gilford was nominated for best supporting actor. I heard in an interview once that they showed the movie to Billy Wilder before it came out. There was a beautifully acted scene early in the film. Wilder agonized for a moment and suggested they cut it. It threw off the flow of the movie.

Watching it again, sort of remembering the brief description of the scene I heard twenty years ago, I wonder if they just moved it to the end.

Presidential debate: This always happens

This always happens with presidential debates. The incumbent performs lousily in the first debate then makes a comeback in the next one. Happened with Reagan, with Obama---those are the only two I really remember. 

Now it's happening with Trump. Obviously he was going to calm down for the second one.

Biden could have refused to debate him again and who would have blamed him. But we'll see how it goes.

Mommy's Secret (Lifetime movie, 2016)

I lost interest by then, but the woman's daughter was tied up for some reason.

A bourgeois woman puts on a fake goatee and robs banks to cover her son's gambling debts. The son, it's explained, is just trying to help provide for his recently widowed mother in the only way open to him, but he keeps losing more and more. 

It could have been a terrible version of Breaking Bad or a weird, non-comedic Fun with Dick and Jane, but they copped out. First they show that she's FORCED to rob banks by the criminals her son owes money to, then---I don't know how much it matters if this is a spoiler---it turns out she was working with the police the whole time to put their operation out of business.

There was a Romanian movie where a school teacher turns to crime to pay off a loan shark. It seemed crazy, but under the circumstances the movie was neutral on whether this was wrong. Now that I think about it, it started with her stealing money from her students, but I think it was to show how pitifully desperate she was, not that she was a monster. [Turns out the movie was Bulgarian, called The Lesson (Urok) and it wasn't clear she stole the kid's money.]

Zachary Ty Bryan again

In happier times.

Checked the news. If they're arraigning Zachary Ty Bryan this morning, they aren't reporting it ahead of time. It'd be weird if they did. 

In the news, it sounded like Bryan and his girlfriend had an apartment in town, like he was living here. 

When I was a kid, I heard that Bill Bixby owned a ranch near here and Cliff Robertson once had a house outside town. Robert Ryan's son lives a few blocks from me. But that's not as exciting as having a washed up child actor living here, one who apparently resides in a less fashionable part of town and could be coaxed into lending his still-recognizable name to the surprising number of zero budget movies being made around here. He could be a big fish if he played his cards right.

At the very least, he could be a celebrity spokesman for some local business. Do some commercials. 

The strangling thing would be a problem, and his appearances on Fox News. His last acting credits were in 2009, but he's worked as a producer since then, so his career may not be on the rocks just yet. He may have just come here to sweat out the pandemic. 

TMZ reports that he made bail today. They reported somewhere that there's been a flurry of internet searches to find out who his girlfriend is. People are still interested. 

Lifetime movies

These Lifetime Channel movies are so odd. I really should like them.

I started to watch one about a mother forced to rob banks to pay her teenage son's gambling debts. There was one that was based on a novel that was weirdly popular in the 1970's about a woman who tries to return home to her wealthy parents after her husband dies in the 1950's. She and her husband had been cruelly shunned for years because they were brother and sister. In another, a nanny turns the children against their mother and tries to legally adopt them. There's one about a girl whose new psychopath friend at school tries to murder her regular friend. A disturbed middle aged woman moves in with relatives and tries to recreate the high school prom she didn't attend. I just read the description. I didn't see it.

I watched just the opening credits of one. It was produced by The Asylum, the company that makes the Sharknado movies among others, which seemed fitting.

The characters in these things are bourgeois, all living in huge houses. Lifetime reportedly took a survey. Their viewers live in single family homes so their movies about people living in single family homes. It was refreshing when the "young" people in Boy in the Attic fled in an old Town Car. I'm happy with women as main characters, but not horrible rich women. 

In the ones I watched, the women were also gun-owners.

Perhaps ironically, the movies each cost around $1.25 million. They're making low budget movies about rich people.

I brought this up with a couple of regular movies. There was A Simple Plan, a thriller about three working class men in a small town who live in houses that are too big and too new and Young Adult where a successful author returns to her home town. The simple townsfolk who never thought to leave for the big city live in McMansions. This how Jason Reitman thinks the proletariat lives. He can't figure out what they're complaining about.

Zachary Ty Bryan

There's a lesson here for all of us. Don't get arrested on a Friday. You could be in jail all weekend before they set bail.

39-year-old former child actor Zachary Ty Bryan is in the Lane County Jail just a few miles from where I write this. He was arrested last night for strangling his girlfriend. He tried to take her cell phone when she called police which it turns out is also a crime. He didn't kill her or anything.

I don't know how serious it is. I had a former co-worker who I heard got arrested so I started googling him from time to time. He got arrested a lot. He was the Shia LaBeouf of Eugene. He was arrested a couple of times for strangulation and nothing seemed to come of it.

So maybe Zachary will be okay, poor devil. 

I wonder what he was doing here.

IMDb shows he has a few producer credits from 2019.

Boy in the Attic (2016)

The boy in the attic hits on girl from across the room in a restaurant.

 Another Lifetime channel movie. A 31-year-old teenage girl and her 41-year-old mother go to clean out her late grandmother's house. The girl keeps hearing strange sounds. She thinks the place it haunted. It turns out there's a young man hiding in the attic. He's not up there all the time. He goes out and wanders around, but he sneaks back in at night and clomps through the house wearing boots. 

It didn't make sense because he hangs around town all day but is hiding in the attic because he's wanted for killing a guy and the local sheriff has vowed to murder him if he ever catches him.

Filmed in Vancouver.

Reminded me of the old made-for-TV movie Bad Ronald. Teenage Ronald (Scott Jacoby) accidentally kills somebody so he and his mother create a hidden room for him to hide in. She dies and new people move into the house, but he's still in there becoming more and more unhinged.

Probably better than the other Lifetime movie I watched, but it wasn't very good. The kids try to flee in the grandmother's old Lincoln Town Car. The guy get the idea that he should switch license plates with another car, but that doesn't help unless the car is the same make and model. He stole a license plate off a Kia.

The Mistress Hunter (2019)

This makes it look more interesting than it was.

So, I read a book on low budget screenwriting by a guy who had written made-for-cable-TV movies. Thought I'd watch a couple and see what he was talking about. I signed up for a free trial for a Lifetime movie streaming video channel. I watched this thing. Just awful.

A woman races on the freeway crying and talking to her friend on the phone. Her husband has been seeing another woman! Her friends advise her to hire someone they heard of, the Mistress Hunter, a woman who torments and abuses unfaithful husbands and their girlfriends. So she does, then her husband and his girlfriend are murdered and now the police think the wife did it. Everyone was annoying. I could see why the husband wanted to get away from his wife, but why did the wife want him back and what on earth did his girlfriend see in him? 

I counted twelve speaking roles, but IMDb shows thirteen. The book said to make children in your script sixteen so they can be played by eighteen-year-olds and you can avoid the trouble and expense of employing child actors, but this did have a child in it, which I guess was necessary to the plot.

I was surprised to see that the star had won a daytime emmy. It was directed by a woman and the cast was an even mix of men and women and it had an Asian actress in a major role, so it had all that going for it. I'm not the target audience. The comments on IMDb were mostly positive, so if this sounds like your thing, don't listen to me.

I clicked on it because I was amused by the old Barbara Eden made-for-TV movie The Woman Hunter (1972). The title had a double meaning because her name was Hunter and she was being hunted, sort of. They could have given it a triple meaning by having her enjoy shooting animals. It had Larry Storch and his wife in cameo roles, with Robert Vaughn. Set mostly in Mexico. A guy drove a Volkswagen Thing which they call a Safari down there.

Todd Solondz, Life During War Time

A sequel to Solondz' Happiness with a different cast.

Joy is married to an obscene phone caller. Her sister Trish is dating a Zionist; she doesn't know that her ex-husband is being released from prison where he served a sentence for raping two boys in the last movie. There's another sister who's now a successful screenwriter. Trish's son is preparing for his bar mitzvah. Her other son is studying anthropology at a fictional university in Oregon.

So one kid is studying to become a man, the other majors in the study of man and their mother and aunt have terrible, terrible luck with men. I assume this has some meaning. The third sister sides with Palestinians. She has a large photo on her wall of a Palestinian boy facing down an Israeli tank.

I see it categorized as a comedy/drama and I understand what they mean. There were a couple of gags in it.

I was surprised to see Paul Reubens and Charlotte Rampling in small roles. 

Available on the Criterion Channel if nowhere else.

Still haven't seen "Call Me By Your Name"

I don't know how much I want to see Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer enjoying a fulfilling sex life while hanging around Italy and being smarter and better-looking than everyone else, but I checked again. It's three years old and you still can't watch it free on Roku.

I've only seen Chalamet in one other movie playing a bourgeois teen drug addict. Couldn't see what the big deal was.

I don't think I've seen Armie Hammer in anything, but I did see Gorky Park. I assumed Lee Marvin's character was inspired by Hammer's great-grandfather, Armand Hammer, who ran Occidental Petroleum and was friendly with Soviet leaders.

Armand Hammer claimed that Armand was a family name, but his father was an official in the Socialist Labor Party, the symbol of which was an arm and hammer. Seems likely that was why he named him that.

 

 

Why you should give up hope

It didn't make sense to me. Maybe he was just looking on the bright side. But somewhere, either George or Mike Kuchar said something to the effect that it's GOOD if no one watches your movies because it means you can do whatever you want.

Maybe he had a point. Lenny Bruce was a failed comic reduced to working as MC in a strip club. It dawned on him that no one was there to see him. They didn't care what he said, so he was free to say anything he wanted. This was how he blossomed into a cultural icon, although it did kill him.

During the Great Depression, artists in New York realized they weren't going to make any money, so they did what they wanted and New York became the new focus of the Art World. Before then it was Paris.

Related in some way to the Taoist concept of Wu Wei. It's the idea that you do a lot better if you don't try. It's contradictory since their ultimate goal is still power and success, and you do have to try a little. At least Lenny Bruce and those artists had given up hope. I doubt that Jackson Pollock thought dribbling paint would be his ticket to the big time.

Crazy Mama (1975)

Part of Roger Corman's Mama Trilogy along with Bloody Mama and Big Bad Mama. The others were set in the '30's. This one was in the late '50's.

Maybe back then you could drive cross country in a stolen car.

I had to keep reminding myself that the classic cars they destroyed were only 17-years-old when it was filmed. They had depreciated as much as they were going to. The Studebaker Silver Hawk bothered me the most. But it'd be like if they made a car crash movie today set in 2003 except that cars in 2003 had seatbelts and padded dashboards.

Cloris Leachman in the title role. Donnie Most (Happy Days' Ralph Malph) was more appealing than I expected. With Merie Earle, Ann Southern, Stuart Whitman, Jim Backus and Dick Miller. Jonathan Demme's second feature. You'll be shocked which member of the gang gets killed first.

Free on Amazon Prime and I saw it on Pluto somewhere.

 

The Queen (2006)

I couldn't stand any of the people involved and I never understood the mob mourning ex-princess Diana's death although I was on their side against the Royal Family.

There was one thing I missed when I saw this movie before. In one scene, Tony Blair wonders why Prince Charles keeps sucking up to him, talking about he wants to modernize the Royal Family, trying to get Blair on his side against his mother.

One of Blair's aides explains that Charles is afraid someone will shoot him. He asked for more security. People were blaming him for Diana's death and he was trying to redirect blame onto his mother so they'd pick her off instead of him.

According to the article linked above, he was afraid someone might take a shot at him during the funeral procession. It would have looked strange if he kept his distance, but he shouldn't have been walking so close to his children.

The Cars That Ate Paris (Australia, 1974)

I used to see this on the shelf in the video stores. The title and the cover art never inspired me to read the back of the box. I assumed it was a comedy, but I clicked on it and watched it on streaming video.

Two brothers traveling by car looking for work wreck outside of a small town called Paris. One is killed. It turns out that the town is causing accidents so it can salvage the wrecked cars. The cars were a few years old from the days before automotive safety was really a thing. People die horribly in the accidents and worse things are done to the ones who survive.

It's classified as a horror/comedy on the Criterion Channel. According to the internet, the producers weren't sure whether to push it as an art film or a horror film. Cult film is probably the best category. 

You wouldn't want to live there without an internet connection or at least a satellite dish, but the town looked okay. It'd be like living in the '50's except for the criminal enterprise and the human experiments.

Peter Weir directed.

Trog, 1970

 

It's amazing what they put on The Criterion Channel, although it is a foreign film. It's very Englandy. They have a quaint English town. An elderly English butcher unwisely attacks Trog (short for troglodyte) with a meat cleaver and is hoisted on his own meat hook, then Trog overturns a Morris Minor Estate and it becomes engulfed in flames.

Trog himself made me think of Piltdown Man. In 1912, an amateur English paleontologist stuck the jawbone of an orangutan onto a modern human skull and claimed to have discovered the missing link. In Trog's case, he was just a regular person but with the head of an ape. The ape head was reportedly left over from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Joan Crawford as a renowned anthropologist who tries to mother Trog. She has him in a cage in her lab, but a local rich guy demands that he be killed because he might bring down property values. 

Crawford's last film. Might make a good double feature with Mildred Pierce. Both had Crawford trying to be motherly with unfortunate results.