Deluge, 1933

Pre-code, 1933. Within the first few minutes, warnings are sent out for ships to return to port and for planes to land at the nearest airport. A terrible, terrible storm is brewing. There's an unexpected solar eclipse. Soon, the west coast is destroyed and submerged. New Orleans is no more. And now the east coast is in for it.

We see an elaborate model of New York City destroyed in a massive flood and earthquake.

They didn't waste any time. All this happened quickly.

The disaster scenes were re-used in other movies, but the film was lost for decades until the 1980's when an Italian-dubbed print was discovered in an Italian film archive. Later, they found a copy with an English language soundtrack and they were able to restore it.

 

The rest of the movie was about the survivors. There's a woman swimmer in a daring two-piece swimsuit whose attempt to break a world record was cancelled because of the apocalypse. She is taken in by two men holed up in a cabin. When they start fighting over her, she escapes by swimming away.

A nice guy lawyer finds her washed up on shore and takes her to an abandoned cabin he moved into.  

A mob of unemployed workers come after them. They already raped and murdered a girl. The lawyer turns out to be pretty good at stabbing people. You'd think a woman of her athletic ability would have been of more help.

65 minutes. Available on Pub-D-Hub.

A bit of a cop out at the end. The lawyer had declared his swimmer girlfriend to be his common-law wife, then he finds out his original wife and children are still alive. So now what's he supposed to do?

All-white except for two or three Black characters presented in a deeply offensive way.

Kirk Cameron murders Christmas

I tried to celebrate Christmas by watching Kirk Cameron Saving Christmas again. I watched it once a few years ago and it was terrible. I tried but truly couldn't take it a second time.

I was inspired to attempt this hate viewing by Kirk Cameron holding large maskless Christmas caroling "protests". 

Cameron says he believes in "herd immunity", which means he WANTS as many people infected as possible. He's not doing it because he thinks God will protect them, he's doing it because he knows people will get the disease. And he knows there are no more hospital beds available there meaning more of those who catch it will die. And he knows that this may be his last chance for a super-spreader event now that vaccines are available.

Kirk Cameron is an anti-Christ. Look at the video of him smiling with genuine glee as he looks over the crowd picturing how many would die, and that was after making a horrible, horrible Christmas movie that could only make a mockery of what he pretends to be his religion.

Now they can get that reality show!

 

“This is like a new launch,” Richard Heene said. “I’m flying high.”

Balloon Boy's parents received a pardon from Colorado's governor for some reason.  

This won't be the new lease on life Heene imagines, but maybe it will be enough of a reminder of their crime that they can get a book deal out of it. Could lead to a Lifetime Channel movie.

'Twas the Night Before Christmas, Art Carney

 

The Painted Bird, the movie

 

Peter Debruge in Variety named The Painted Bird as one of the worst movies of the year. He walked out of it because he couldn't take the brutality. The book it was based on was a literary hoax so you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that it was fiction.

And there was something Salman Rushdie said on C-Span. He briefly mentioned a short story he read by a Chilean writer about a family that lives through a massive earthquake. The difference between comedy and tragedy is in the pacing. The story was only a couple of pages long but so many horrible things happening to the family were packed into it, it came across as funny.

I did this inadvertently. I wrote a heartfelt essay about looking through my junior high yearbook. I found it depressing because I knew about the horrible things that happened to the kids at my school. One boy's mother died after a long illness then his father committed suicide after her funeral. A boy who drowned himself in the river while fighting drug addiction, one who died of an overdose, one who was homeless and mentally ill and was finally committed to the state hospital after being ruled criminally insane. One whose alcoholic father battered him and his mother, a friendless kid who became more and more angry and would wander through the halls talking to himself, a kid who nobody liked who became a car thief like his older brother, but his brother got probation while he went to prison. 

The old people in the writing group thought it was hilarious.

If you could watch the movie in fast motion it might be easier to take.

Zontar, The Thing from Venus, Larry Buchanan, 1966

From A.S. Hamrah's recent review:

If, as Godard said, “the definition of the human condition should be in the mise en scène itself,” then Zontar, which plays like an industrial documentary on Dallas living rooms and shopping centers, puts it there in negative. A dead-watch-battery miasma pervades the film, a three in the afternoon of the soul.
...
The inadequacy of the film’s world seems normal and accurate, snapshots of the time as it was. In the end it’s a valid document of a place that did survive some kind of attack, but kept on going the same dull way, learning nothing.

Made for around $30 thousand ($250 thousand today) for AIP to fill out some TV deal they made. A remake of Roger Corman's It Conquered the World in 16mm color.

I thought maybe the scientist working with Zontar to take over the Earth and usher in a golden age was supposed to represent American Communists. But then the U.S. Army general whose mind was taken over by Zontar goes around telling people that "the Communists" are staging a revolt, using that as an excuse to enslave humanity. How many Communists did they think there were in the Dallas-Fort Worth area?

I liked Zontar himself with his leathery wings living in a big giant cave. John Agar as a two-fisted scientist who knocks people out with one punch or a single karate chop.

Paul Schrader's low budget tip

You know how Eric Rohmer made movies with long dialog scenes? And you know how one of his trademarks was that he'd show people going places in cars? If he didn't do this, some of the movies would haven taken place entirely in apartments, like they could have been filmed anywhere. Showing people driving through town gave a sense of place.

So here's an excerpt from an interview with Paul Schrader in Filmmaker Magazine discussing his movie The Canyons. The movie was made for a quarter million dollars but starred Lindsey Lohan among others. Read the interview here.

...Talk is cheap. So a microbudget film is mostly people sitting around talking. And if you have good dialogue and a good kind of story and interesting people, that can work. But it can start to feel like a stage play because you’re not spending money on action sequences. So in order to keep it from feeling like a stage play, you have to walk and talk, although not at the same time. So this film, it’s walk, walk, walk, talk, talk, talk, walk, walk, walk. That opens the structure up for music because you can just have these 50-second [music] cues [underneath] creating a mood. And then you get back into the talking again... In order to make a dialogue-driven microbudget film feel more kinetic, you have all these transportation scenes — how people are getting from one place to another — and those [require] big music cues. ... It just opens it up and makes it feel not very rushed. It’s nice. I mean, these music passages are one thing you couldn’t do for television. 

You want to see a movie where they didn't do this, see Henry Jaglom's Venice/Venice, filmed on location in Venice, Italy and Venice, California. They took the cast and crew to Italy for scenes of them sitting around a table talking.

Shia LaBeouf

Shia LaBeouf really did make a sacrifice for his "art". For years his female stans have been his most avid defenders. Now the only ones supporting him are Trumpian men who think he's being victimized by Feminists. They think shooting dogs is "method acting".

For years, every time LaBeouf committed some idiotic crime that threatened his movie career, he would start with what he thought was "art". Just being vaguely liberal was enough to get the anti-Trump forces on his side. I assume that's put a damper on misogynists coming to his defense. 

I hope to heck this is finally the end of that guy.

Vincente Minnilli, The Cobweb, 1955

You know all that crap George Lucas started about the "hero's journey", trying to make Star Wars seem like less of a fluke? People are still promoting that nonsense.

If you want an archetypal story, I say go with an Oedipal conflict.

There was the whole first season of Star Trek where Captain Kirk was always fighting someone trying to take over the ship, which I was a little surprised to learn is considered an Oedipal conflict. The first episode of the show, "Charlie X", was essentially a science fiction version of Oedipus Rex. Captain Kirk was clearly the aggressor in the conflict, humiliating Charlie for no reason. There've been a couple of movies about aging British school masters threatened by younger teachers displacing them. 

Shane took it further than most. In the opening scene, the father (Van Heflin) picks up a broken, unloaded rifle (what do you think that symbolized) that they gave to the kid to play with and tries to scare Shane with it. But Shane is a real man. He moves in. Van Heflin's wife falls in love with him and his son worships him. In the end, Helfin is going to go to town to intentionally get himself killed, and he comes right out and says he's doing it so Shane can sleep with his wife. Even then, Shane pistol whips him and takes his place in the final showdown.

This came to mind while watching this thing. Richard Widmark as a psychiatrist treating a patient who I guess has an Oedipal complex. When the young fellow is attracted to Widmark's wife, Gloria Grahame, he's afraid Widmark will do whatever father figures in these Oedipal struggles do.

A big soap opera around a private psychiatric clinic. Widescreen in Eastmancolor.

It was all right. With Lauren Becall, Charles Boyer and Lillian Gish. Oscar Levant was in there somewhere but I missed him.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Never Say Never Again (1983)

The only James Bond movie I didn't find disappointing. It turns out that Thunderball (1965) was produced by different people than the rest of the series. They owned the rights and could produce this stand-alone remake.

Stars 52-year-old Sean Connery. There was talk in the beginning of the film about him being too old. He was three years younger than Roger Moore and they were both younger than Tom Cruise is now.

With Barbara Carrera, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Kim Basinger and Rowan Atkinson; Edward Fox as M and Max Von Sydow in charge of SPECTRE.

I don't think it's possible to electronically control sharks and make them attack someone, but it was so impressive that Sean Connery was swimming around with real sharks that you forgot about that. There was a lot of scuba diving which Sean Connery reportedly hated doing, so that was really him down there.  

Has a sequence in which James Bond is equally adept at video games and ballroom dancing. When I saw this in a theater, some boys sitting near me noted that one of the guys had an impractical but aesthetic World War Two Japanese Nambu pistol.

Shia LaBeouf

FKA Twigs has filed suit against her ex-"boyfriend" Shia LaBeouf for sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress.

From Variety:

The musician was once woken up by LaBeouf towering over her, violently squeezing her arms against her will and choking her, according to the lawsuit. The alleged incident occurred during a trip to celebrate Valentine’s Day in 2019. As he was strangling her, the lawsuit claims, he was whispering, “If you don’t stop you are going to lose me.” After the alleged incident, LaBeouf became manic while driving back to his home. Barnett tried to get out of the car, as he threatened to crash the car, unless he professed her “eternal love” for him, and though he briefly stopped at a gas station, he “violently attacked” her, throwing her against the car, screaming in her face and attempting to strangle her, before forcing her to get back in the car.

And this:

When filming “The Tax Collector,” LaBeouf got so into character, according to the lawsuit, he took on the role of a gangster in real life, and claimed to drive around Los Angeles, shooting stray dogs dead, so that he could get into the “mindset” of a killer. Barnett, an animal lover, was “profoundly disturbed and terrified.”

He knowingly infected her with a sexually transmitted disease and has loaded guns around the house.

View a full copy of the lawsuit in the Variety article linked above.

Is anyone at all surprised by this?

 

Jack Webb vs. Frank Sinatra, Jr

Dragnet made me feel like even I could be a star. All you had to do was stand there and read your cue cards as fast as you could. But I saw this episode of Adam-12 which seemed to be a pilot for another series. Frank Sinatra, Jr, plays an investigator for the D.A.'s office. He seemed to be a Joe Friday substitute, but he was so bland and lifeless, he made Jack Webb look like---I don't know---Al Pacino or Frank Sinatra, Sr.

Come to think of it, toward the end, Marlon Brando had all his lines on cue cards or pinned to the actor he was speaking to.  

Live streaming movie channel

It was kind of nice. I got on Pluto, watched their live streaming movie channels. It was like watching regular TV! I could choose the channel but was unburdened by any choice beyond that. I watched the end of The Boys From Brazil. Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele, Lawrence Olivier as a Simon Wiesenthal-like Nazi-hunter. Sadly, Mengele was still alive when the movie was made and he died of old age rather than being ripped apart by dobermans. Jeremy Black as Hitler's bratty clone.

The Undoing (HBO "limited series") Nichole Kidman, Hugh Grant

Watching this thing, it dawned on me that I had no idea what Nichole Kidman looked like. About the only thing I've seen her in is Lars von Trier's Dogville which was years ago and was awful. Why do people like that guy?

The Undoing was directed by another Dane, Susanne Bier. Kidman plays a wealthy New York psychologist whose pediatric oncologist husband is accused of murdering his girlfriend, the mother of one of his patients. Their son, Noah Jupe, goes to an exclusive private school. One of his classmates is the victim's son.

In one scene, we learn that the victim was one of those rich people who likes to hang around naked in health club locker rooms. I've heard that's common among the upper classes.

I watched this thing after hearing Hugh Grant interviewed about it on Fresh Air. Terry Gross gave away the ending which made me think that it wasn't a mystery, but there are at least four suspects including Grant. Even the kid has a motive. I don't know how much that ruined it for me.

With Donald Sutherland as Kidman's rich father who has his own helicopter.

I didn't like Nichole Kidman at all. I think I'll go back to never watching her in anything.

Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

I saw this on TV when I was a kid and saw it as a pretty good true crime movie. Inspired by the case of Charles Starkweather whose crimes were worse than what was portrayed in the movie. I didn't really distinguish it from other movies of that type. Seeing it again now, I had the same reaction. I haven't seen any of Malick's other movies. If I did, that might cast a different light on it.

They really toned down Starkweather's crimes. In real life, he didn't leave anyone alive if he could help it. His victims included one toddler.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

I found Spencer Tracy using Jiu Jitsu less plausible every time I saw it, but it turns out the stuff I had doubts about was real. You really can grab someone's wrist with one hand and throw them. 

Black Rock is made even more isolated by wartime shortages. The place has one car, one Jeep and one hearse. Robert Ryan rules over the town with Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin as his dangerously dull-witted henchmen.

A technicolor film noir. With Dean Jagger, Ann Francis, and Walter Brennan. 

Available on the Criterion Channel.

A Time to Kill (1996)

Based on the John Grisham novel.

Years ago, there was an incident here. There was a noise complaint. A band was playing in a co-op near the university. The police tried to force their way in but the residents inside held the doors shut.

"We wanted to make sure they didn't come in without a warrant," the guy later told reporters.

Now, they also reported that an earlier case against the same people had been thrown out of court because the cops forced their way in without a warrant. All the evidence was thrown out. Why were these people so intent on making sure the cops didn't make the same mistake twice?

In this movie, the judge makes a ruling that violates established case law. It was reversible error. Instead of letting it go, instead of saving it in case he needs it to overturn his client's conviction on appeal, attorney Matthew McConaughey points out the judge's error to him. The judge gives the same decision against a change of venue, but this time he carefully considers it first as the law requires and doesn't dismiss it out of hand.

The movie is hard to take. It starts with a couple of subhuman Mississippi crackers raping and attempting to murder a Black child. Her father kills them as they're being brought to the courthouse to be arraigned, so he's charged with murder.

The Klan terrorizes the community. There's also a bizarre anti-NAACP subplot. I don't know what Grisham had against them. 

Had this dramatic music that seemed old fashioned at times. It made me think of Bernard Hermann's score for Taxi Driver. I liked it, but it seemed out of place. I would have liked more of it.

With Samuel L. Jackson, Sandra Bullock, Donald Sutherland and his boy, Kiefer. Kevin Spacey as the snotty prosecutor.

Loving (2016)

The Loving family, 1967.

I have a friend in Russia who wrote to me when Obama was elected. She was completely baffled why people were so excited about it. And she was right---he was just another right-wing Democrat a la Clinton or Biden. I wrote back that I agreed with her, but, among other things, that when Obama was born, his parents could not legally marry or live in 16 states where inter-racial marriage was a crime and that his election was seen as a triumph over racism.

Loving is about the couple in Loving vs. Virginia, the case which ended anti-misegenation laws in the U.S.

Virginia cops came bursting into their home in the middle of the night. They wanted to catch them having sex because interracial sex was an even more serious crime than interracial marriage. They had gone to the District of Columbia to get married and returned to Virginia. This was a crime.

They pled guilty and were ordered to immediately leave Virginia and not come back together for 25 years. They could come back one at a time.

It's still amazing how backward the south was.

Some years later, the ACLU took their case. They had to return to Virginia and face re-arrest and years in prison to appeal their conviction. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned their conviction unanimously.

According to Wikipedia, Alabama continued to enforce its anti-misegenation laws until 1970.

The movie was probably more true-to-life and thus a bit unstructured. The characters didn't have a single-minded goal like they have in most movie.

There's often a portrayal of Civil Rights actions as spontaneous, not the result of careful planning and strategizing. Rosa Parks is often presented as having just been especially tired the day she refused to give up her seat on the bus. There are people who see deliberate challenges to racist laws as somehow insincere. I've seen ostensibly liberal whites outraged over acts of political symbolism. But here it was a case where a couple got married with no thought of it as a political act.

Available on Netflix