Doubt (2008)

The horrible, horrible nun turns out to be---well, not "nice", but actively opposed to child molestation. Not to the point that she would pick up the phone and call the police, but she was against it. Her terrible personality turns out to be of some use as she confronts the vaguely hip priest she suspects of abusing the Catholic school's first Black student in the 1960's.

Calling the Catholic-laden NYPD might not have done much good anyway, and she did have other reasons not to after meeting with the kid's mother.

Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Viola Davis, Amy Adams.

The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982)

Paul Newman as a once-prominent Boston lawyer now a washed up alcoholic. His friend, Jack Warden, has sent an easy case his way. A Catholic hospital gave a woman the wrong anesthetic and reduced her to a persistent vegetative state. All he has to do is accept a check from the insurance company but he's so outraged that he turns the money down without consulting his clients and goes to trial against the Catholic Church that has James Mason as their lawyer.

It seemed like a crap shoot. The trial really didn't go well for him, and the ending seemed like sheer chance.

Real trials aren't that dramatic. There was a civil trial I went to. The better lawyer in the case spoke calmly, especially when making objections so the jury wouldn't think he was desperate to keep them from hearing something.

But a lawyer taking a chance by going to court and the trial not being as dull as a real trial aren't valid criticisms of a courtroom drama. Is a less-stressful, low stakes story really what you want? They might have given Paul Newman clearer motivation. He gazes at the woman in the hospital and just seeing her in her state is enough to change his personality.

The doctors' conduct and that of the church's law firm was worse than it first appeared. 

Directed by Sidney Lumet, written by David Mamet. 

Larry King, Karla Faye Tucker

 I haven't changed my mind, but since I pretty much attacked Larry King after he died, here's something from Jeffrey St Clair on Counterpunch:

+ Larry King’s death row interview with Karla Faye Tucker brought the the moral depravity of the death penalty into the homes of millions of Americans and also punctured George W’s brand of “passionate conservatism,” as Bush was caught snickering and smirking at Tucker’s pleas for clemency. She was just another number in his mad rush toward killing 157 inmates.

The Defense of New Haven (2016)

It wasn't as cute as it might have been, which isn't a bad thing. A Christian movie, a military thriller performed entirely by children. A lot of the boys had beards or mustaches and seemed to play more than one role.

The kids weren't in the same age group. Most of them seemed to be about ten but there were also six-year-olds playing adults so it was like The Flintstones where Fred was twice as tall as Barney. Then they had a scene with a toddler who was actually playing a toddler. But since the adults were ten, she was a gigantic toddler.

I'm sure kids would like it. They were running around on elaborate kid-sized sets. They had steam powered boats and canals or waterways within the city. Their being armed with crossbows was perhaps less disturbing than having them shoot each other with guns. There were a couple of killings, but they didn't go overboard. Which was good. It can be confusing when they try to obscure the violence.

Like the old 1970's film Bugsy Malone, a gangster musical performed entirely by children. It took me a while watching that movie to realize that a kid being hit in the face with a pie was supposed to represent him being killed. Once you figured it out, it didn't make the murders any less disturbing. It'd be like having a spanking machine as a substitute for the electric chair but still having the kid die in it.

Free with Amazon Prime.

Coup de Torchon (Bertrand Tavernier, 1981)

 

It's been years since I read the novel Pop 1280 by Jim Thompson. The novel was set in Texas before World War One; this movie, based on it, is in French West Africa in 1938. They see World War Two looming on the horizon, but they assume it will be a repeat of World War One. The novel had the added element of the Sheriff having to run for re-election. 

Lucien Cordier, the only police officer in a small town in French colonial Africa, is lazy and ineffectual. He's physically humiliated by local pimps and by police in a nearby town who he turns to for advice. His wife is sleeping with a man she claims is her brother who lives with them. 

Lucien turns out to be a violent manipulative psychopath which is kind of nice at first. He's the least racist white character in the movie, but he does pretty much nothing for Africans. 

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Corpus Christi (Poland, 2019)

Poland is drab enough. At least people see it that way. This movie's desaturated color makes it worse. Movies with prison scenes are bad enough as it is. Most of it had kind of an interesting setting, a small Polish town.

Youthful offender Daniel gets out of juvenile prison where he served a sentence for second degree murder. He found religion there, which in Poland means he became devoutly Catholic. The priest tells him they don't let ex-convicts into seminaries. Which may be just as well since he has a sex scene in a restroom as soon as he's out of prison. I guess I can also tell you that headbutting is the young fellow's fighting technique of choice.

Daniel travels to a small town where a job awaits him at a sawmill. Instead, he puts on a clerical collar and claims to be an itinerant priest. He's asked to take over at the parish while the regular priest goes for medical treatment. He becomes popular for his unorthodox style but alienates much of the town when he takes an unpopular stand on a local tragedy.

Maybe it would make a double feature with Catch Me if You Can although, in Spielberg's movie, the imposter does nothing for anyone, steals millions of dollars and endangers people's lives. And yet that film would be the upbeat one.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Kirk Cameron fleeing California

Remember when Kirk Cameron was humiliated by Christian movie producers? He had starred in a movie based on the "Left Behind" series and just a few years later, obviously realizing their mistake, they did a remake without him starring Nicolas Cage. 

Then there was the Saving Christmas fiasco. It was a terrible movie. It was the exact opposite of A Charlie Brown Christmas. At one point, Cameron says that materialism is good because Christ was MADE out of material. It's hard to imagine very many Christians being moved or touched by this.

That was 2014. Since then, Cameron's been in two short films and had a bit part in one feature.

Mainstream stars like Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Garner and Ewan McGregor are doing Christian movies now and making a monkey out of washed up "celebrities" like Cameron.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Once the domain of Christian conservatives with dwindling name value like Kirk Cameron and Kevin Sorbo, faith-based films no longer are radioactive. They may not yet be attracting the Brad Pitts, but they are featuring actors who are not without choices — and these days, faith-based movies are a viable choice. David Oyelowo and Kate Mara teamed in 2015's Captive, a thriller in which they discover redemption. Ewan McGregor lent his name to the upcoming Last Days in the Desert, in which he plays Jesus. Also on the horizon, Renee Zellweger headlines Paramount's Same Kind of Different as Me, in which she plays a dying woman whose husband makes a spiritual connection. Such films hope to build on their appeal to Christian audiences — with marketing that courts influential pastors and church groups — by adding more familiar stars. [emphasis added]

I wish they'd just say "religious" instead of "faith-based".

You know how, when they have royal weddings, English aristocrats who don't get invitations leave town so if anyone asks they can say they couldn't attend because they were out of town?

Well, Kirk Cameron is moving to Texas. "I can't be in movies. I live in Texas," he'll soon tell people.

Cameron wrote somewhere:

"While there are many beautiful aspects of California, there are also some... not so great factors. and recently I've been tossing around the idea of looking for a new property and some land in another state, where taxes are lower, patriotism is higher, and biblical values of faith and family are celebrated."

I really don't see how patriotism jibes with religiosity, devotion to family or lower taxes.

He had a pretty good run. Stretched things out far longer than other former teen idols. Christianity really paid off for him. We'll see if he can keep it going and how he gets along with the Texans.

The Ghost of Peter Sellers (Peter Medak, 2020)

A documentary by Peter Medak about the disastrous production of Ghost in the Noonday Sun starring Peter Sellers. Medak directed the movie in 1973. Filmed in Cyprus.

I don't know if it would have been any good no matter what they did, but they started filming before the script was ready and filming on a ship at sea turned out to be a terrible idea. Peter Sellers didn't make it any easier.

I don't know how this failure affected Medak's career. Before Ghost in the Noonday Sun he directed The Ruling Class starring Peter O'Toole and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. After the disaster, he directed more TV than movies. It's apparently been eating away at him for nearly half a century in any case.

Terry Gilliam always makes a documentary about the making of his movies so he can show that it wasn't his fault if it turns into a fiasco. Medak did the same thing here, just 47 years too late.

Available on the Criterion Channel or for rent on Amazon Prime.

Ordinary People (1980)

I was unsure watching this what Donald Sutherland was doing wrong. It must have been something because, surely, Mary Tyler Moore couldn't be the bad guy.

I remember two slight controversies about this movie. One was that it was about rich people but it was called Ordinary People, like this was how Hollywood thought everybody lived.

The other was that Barbra Streisand fans were outraged that director Robert Redford got an Oscar for this, his first movie, and Streisand didn't get one three years later for Yentl. Ordinary People was a serious drama about a family who lost one son in an accident and nearly lost his guilt-stricken brother to suicide while Yentl was just crap.

Judd Hirsch who was on Taxi at the time plays the son's psychiatrist. 

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Larry King, RIP

It was amazing to me how big Larry King was for years on radio, then on TV. Even before his show on CNN, a large percentage of people said he was the biggest influence on their political views even though he never really expressed his own views. 

King's been quoted saying that he never learned anything while he was talking, but that depends on who you're listening to. He wrote a foreword to a book by charlatan John Edward, the "psychic" who talks to the dead. South Park dubbed Edward "The Biggest Douche in the Universe". King wrote that he didn't know if Edward talked to the dead or not. You could say that about anybody, I guess. Maybe Miley Cyrus communicates with the dead. How would anybody know?

Members of the Ku Klux Klan would appear on King's show and insist they weren't racist. He never asked what they were doing in the Klan if they weren't. Seems like an obvious question.

On one show, he had a woman on who had written a book claiming that Elvis Presley faked his death. I wasn't sure what to make of his response. I thought he was expressing doubt when he asked why no legitimate news organization was pursuing the story, but he ended by promising to put the author in touch with a real reporter he knew.

BLM vs MAGA

"BLM took a beating from cops and federal agents almost every night and came back stronger and bigger, week after week after week…MAGA had one Pickett’s Charge, with many of the cops on their side, and then nothing but whining."

Jeffrey St Clair

Counterpunch

The Lie (Canada, 2018)

A foreign film from Canada based on an even more foreign film from Germany. Started out as one of those movies about bourgeois parents trying to protect their teenager who, in this case, says she impulsively killed her friend by pushing her off a bridge in the dead of winter. Instead of calling 9-1-1 in case her friend is still alive, her father decides to flee the scene.

The parents are divorced. They really should have thought it out ahead of time and decided exactly how far they were willing to go because they go way too far to protect a daughter who's really not that great. She's a bad seed, but not quite in the way you think.

It was like an especially good Lifetime movie. Followed the formula for a low budget made-for-cable TV movie, with one primary location and six secondary locations and about a dozen speaking roles.

Directed by Veena Sud. Based on the movie Wir Monster aka We Monsters (Germany, 2015).

Stars Peter Sarsgaard, Marielle Enos and Joey King (who's a girl.)

Free on Amazon Prime.

The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch, 2019)

Thing I never understood about zombie movies is why there were so many dead bodies lying around waiting to come back to life. In this one, we see the undead digging their way out of their graves, so it makes some sense. The regular living people recognize their old neighbors. A man recognizes some nice guys who died in a car wreck two years earlier. I guess it's possible with modern embalming.

The undead children made me sad. The living dead are drawn to things they did when they were alive. The children look for toys and candy. Bill Murray as police chief says, "I knew those kids!"

Bill Murray was pushing seventy. As in a lot of roles like this, it's better to have an actor who's too old than a more plausible age.

I would have liked the movie better if not for what they did at the end. They had a perfectly nice zombie movie, one about old people. They tend to talk calmly, in mundane terms. But then they talked about being actors in a zombie movie.

Tilda Swinton as a Scottish undertaker with a samurai sword.

Danny Glover, Steve Buscemi as a farmer in a MAGA hat, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny, Tom Waits, Jahi Winston, Taliyah Whitaker, Rosie Perez, Carol Kane, Selena Gomez.

Even the kids playing child zombies had long lists of credits.

The Fiddling Horse (2019)

A behind-the-scenes photo.

 

The one time I bet on a horse race, I won, but I was robbed of my victory because the winning jockey crowded another horse. I'm sure the little fellow didn't mean to, but I vowed then I would bet only on dog races. There are no jockeys. The dogs can do whatever they want and no one cares. I had pretty good luck the few times I bet on the greyhounds, but the only off-track betting place closed and I kept hearing about the horrors of animal abuse.

The Fiddling Horse stars Andy Kindler and Josh "Elvis" Weinstein. I've listened to them almost religiously on their Thought Spiral podcast in spite of their seething hatred for anyone to the left of Joseph Lieberman. They hate Bernie Sanders and they despise his supporters as much as they hate Trump. I must be a lot more tolerant than they are.

Weinstein plays a fairly rich guy in the time share business. His wife (Paula Lindberg) is trying to get in good with a gaggle of mean, rich southern women, but she needs more money. They try to get rid of a race horse she inherited from her estranged father which leads them to crooked former jockey Andy Kindler.

An important lesson about not getting in over your head with the Dixie Mafia.

Kindler was a semi-regular on Everybody Loves Raymond and on Marc Maron's sit-com, but it was Weinstein's first acting job other than the skits he did on Mystery Science Theater when he was a teenager. They were both pretty good.

Written and directed by CJ Wallis.

The Fiddling Horse is now free with Amazon Prime.

I had trouble understanding the actors but closed captioning solved that.

Scent of a Woman (1992)

Squealing on classmates is one of life's simple pleasures, but Chris O'Donnell won't do it. He plays a student on scholarship at an exclusive New England prep school who gets a job staying with incredibly obnoxious blind guy Al Pacino while his niece and her family go away for Thanksgiving. Pacino drags him off to New York.

Pacino's niece guilt trips O'Donnell into taking the job. If it had been me, I would have walked away. I would have felt guilty for a minute, then tremendous relief.

And, later, when Al Pacino announces he's going to kill himself, I would have called 911 and walked away then, too, felt guilty for a minute. Then pure relief.

Phil Spector dead. Finally.

Phil Spector has died in prison at 81, reportedly of COVID-19.

They're still talking about that "wall of sound" crap. If Spector hadn't come up with it, someone else would have done something just like it and if they didn't, people would have been perfectly happy listening to something else. It's a shame he didn't die at birth.

Lana Clarkson, murdered by Spector in 2003.

Catch Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002)

I remember seeing this guy, Frank Abagnale, on The Tomorrow Show in the '70's. I thought he was a monster. What kind of person would impersonate a pediatrician or get on a plane full of people pretending to be the pilot? It's okay in the movie because he's doing it to get his divorced parents back together.

In the opening scene he sabotages his own appearance on To Tell the Truth by proudly naming the man who arrested him. Which was the point of the movie. A teenage conman (28-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio) sees the man trying to put him in prison (Tom Hanks) as a father figure.

I prefer a more traditional Oedipal conflict. 

Jessica Campbell, RIP; Dustin Diamond

I read about the death of Jessica Campbell who was in the movie Election and the series Freaks and Geeks. She died suddenly last month at age 38 in Portland, Oregon, where she worked as a "naturopathic physician".

It caused me to reflect on my own personality---how, if it were me, I would have gone on clinging to my acting career long after it was kaput, how I'd have no idea when it was time to move on with my life. I'd be like Dustin Diamond. 

Then I read that poor Dustin Diamond has been diagnosed with stage four cancer and is beginning treatment.

Diamond had a younger brother who died in childhood and his mother died while he was a teenager on Saved by the Bell. People should have had a lot more sympathy for him, especially me. Saved by the Bell was way after my time. I never watched it, but I grew to dislike Diamond, the poor devil. He had the worst of both worlds. He wasn't especially beloved as a child actor, but he still ended up with the personality defects of a former child star.

Good luck to him.

The car in Detour (Edgar Ulmer, 1945)

You know that beautiful custom Lincoln Continental V-12 the rich guy was driving in Detour? That was director Edgar Ulmer's car. It was a few years old---it was a 1941 model---but that's because civilian car production ended in February, 1942, not because he couldn't afford a new one. Just because you worked on Poverty Row doesn't mean you were actually poor. Edgar Ulmer was doing just fine.

That was before cars had power steering or power brakes so the thing was probably murder to drive.

Odd that the movie made no mention of World War Two. Watching the rich guy popping what I assume was Benzedrine to stay awake made me wish we still had over-the-counter amphetamines. But then, I won't give it away, but something else happens and dangerous stimulants didn't seem so good after all.

 

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

An actual pandemic movie set during the Black Death. It made me wonder why Christians don't think COVID-19 is punishment from God. Some thought that about AIDS. Kirk Cameron thinks that about hurricanes, but he thinks the pandemic is a hoax and that God will protect him in any case.

It's been a few years since I last watched The Seventh Seal. The people in it seem sort of modern, but then they surprise you. Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) assumes that the girl about to be burned at the stake really did talk to Satan. When they first see her, they do nothing to interfere. Later, when she's about to be burned, the squire gives some thought to rescuing her. "I thought of killing the soldiers..."

The squire (Gunnar Björnstrand) is the cool one. He's an atheist, he makes some good use of his capacity for violence. But he had also been a serial rapist although he says he tired of that now.

There was more humor in it than I remembered.

 

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Herzog really is a pretty good director. The estimated budget was $25 million, which I guess is low budget.  It was while discussing this movie that he mentioned that he doesn't shoot coverage. They work very fast this way. I think I heard he would start filming at 9 and be done for the day around noon. But the crew kept grumbling. He kept hearing them say something about "coverage". 

"Vas ist dis coverage?" he asked someone.

The guy told him and Herzog shrugged it off. 

Nicolas Cage stood up and said something about how he was at last working with a director who knew what he was doing and the grumbling stopped.

I suppose it's like other cop movies where the detective plays by his own rules, but in this case he really is a terrible person. They make him turn in his badge and his gun at one point which seemed like an entirely positive step.  The opening scenes imply that a back injury sent him into a downward spiral of drug addiction and depravity, but he was a bit of a jerk before.

Being such an awful lieutenant actually helps him in his work.

From the producer of The Bad Lieutenant but not a sequel or a remake. Herzog said he never heard of the other movie.

 

Maybe Nicolas Cage is a good Klaus Kinski substitute.

Across the Bridge (UK, 1957)

Rod Steiger touches up his hair to match the guy whose passport he stole.

Rod Steiger plays a crabby German businessman with British citizenship. He comes to New York to make a business deal. He gets a call. His secretary in London warns him that Scotland Yard is investigating the missing $3 million Steiger embezzled.

He heads for Mexico, takes the train since airlines have passenger lists and he doesn't want to be extradited from Mexico. He meets a man on the train, drugs him and steals his identity and comes up with a clever scheme to get across the border, but once he's there he finds himself up against people who are smarter and more corrupt than he is and British detectives who cope surprisingly well.

It bogged down a bit toward the end and I felt sorry for the dog.

He was only facing 7 to 10 years, about what the British gave people convicted of homosexuality back then. You'd have to be crazy NOT to be an embezzler.

With Bernard Lee.

Based on a story by Graham Greene.

Greene had fled to Mexico in the '30's after being sued for libel in Britain for a scathing review he wrote of a Shirley Temple movie. Something about "dimpled depravity". I can see why they sued.

Available on Pub-D-Hub.

Russia did it!

 

As expected, right-wing Democrats have started blaming Vladimir Putin. China has pointed out that, after all the attacks on China from the West over the violent protests in Hong Kong, it turns out that America is no picnic, either. Why can't we just admit that China has a pretty good point?

 

Armed fascists have invaded one state capitol building after another and no one blamed Russia. They upped the ante and attacked Congress, but it was a natural progression. They talk like it came out of nowhere. Much like them blaming Russia for Trump being elected in the first place even after he effortlessly crushed one Republican after another in the primaries.

Trump supporters are idiots. They were being photographed committing extremely serious crimes---they murdered a cop on top of everything else---and they STILL wouldn't put on masks.

Lousily planned coup attempt

Just this morning I was walking out to the car to go to work. You know how, whenever anyone in another country gets elected who the U.S. government doesn't want elected, the U.S. points to protests by right-wing stooges as proof that they didn't really win and demands that the elected leader step down or negotiate with the losers? I was contemplating this and whether the U.S. could keep doing it after Trump.

That very afternoon, a mob of simian Trump supporters attacked the Capitol. 

They hardly arrested any, but the morons took so many pictures they can probably be rounded up as soon as Trump is out of office and can't pardon them.

The late Ashli Babbitt, shot climbing through a broken window.

Barron may be cute now, but he'll look like this in a couple of years.

Nancy Pelosi's office.

Tanya Roberts, RIP

Tanya Roberts has died at 65. Her death was announce prematurely on Sunday night. 

I've seen it both ways. People have posted heartfelt condolences for people who had been dead for years, and there are these premature announcements. 

I had seen Tanya Roberts in The Beastmaster and perhaps in the couple of episodes of Charlies Angels I saw. I've never sat through A View to a Kill  and I didn't watch That '70's Show.

Her death was from a urinary tract infection that spread to her kidney, gallbladder, liver and blood stream, apparently unrelated to COVID-19, although it's possible that the pandemic stopped her from seeing doctor sooner.

Fatal Deviation (Ireland, 1998)

I watched some of Fatal Deviation, Ireland's first martial arts movie. Made in 1998, filmed on Hi8 and SVHS. I think I would have enjoyed it if it had been about beating up the English. I didn't watch much of it. The hero beats up a couple of guys being jerks in a grocery store. A woman stocking shelves tells them they have to pay for the stuff they're eating. They say something back to her that must have been considered terribly offensive in Ireland because the hero comes over and makes a terrible mess, knocking one into a display of paper towels. The other wisely runs away.

When the waiter in a pub spills a pitcher of beer, a man with a pony tail knocks him down. The altercation appears to be over but the hero beats up the guys at the table. Manages to do so without causing any damage to the business. Then the bartender aims a shotgun at him. Instead of simply leaving like the bartender wants, he takes the shotgun from him, hits him in the face with it then aims it at him.

I skipped ahead some more. There 's a fight in some ancient building, a castle or a monastery. The locations were interesting. A pasty overweight Irish guy has a nude scene I could have done without.

The hero keeps running into a mysterious bearded monk. 

Why don't we have indigenous martial arts in the west? I googled and found a list of European martial arts but most of them were just things they taught soldiers during World War Two. There was Bartitsu which was started by a British guy named Bart who had learned Jiu Jitsu in Japan. There was Savate, of course--French foot fighting. 

The only indigenous British martial art was called "Shin Kicking". Two English guys kick each other in the shins until one of them quits. This was actually on the list. No wonder they're called martial arts.

Available on YouTube.

Ed Wood in the Marines

This might be old news, but it came as a surprise to me. The information apparently  came from the book The Unknown War of Edward D. Wood, Jr.: 1942 - 1946 published in 2017. Author James Pontolillo filed a Freedom if Information Act request and got Wood's military records.

From Wikipedia:

In 1942, Wood enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, just months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Assigned to the 2nd Defense Battalion, he reached the rank of corporal before he was discharged.^[8] Although Wood reportedly claimed to have faced strenuous combat, including having his front teeth knocked out by a Japanese rifleman, his military records reveal this to be false; apart from recovering bodies on Betio following the Battle of Tarawa, and experiencing minor Japanese bombing raids on Betio and the Ellice Islands, a recurring filariasis infection left him performing clerical work for the remainder of his enlistment, and his dental extractions were carried out over several months by Navy dentists, unconnected to any combat.^[9][10] Wood later claimed (erroneously or otherwise) that he feared being wounded in battle more than he feared being killed, mainly because he was afraid a combat medic would discover him wearing a bra and panties under his uniform during the Battle of Tarawa. 

In another book on Ed Wood, his wife said she didn't believe all the stuff he told her about the war. Eddie was such a bullshitter, she said if I remember correctly. But, she said, she had been surprised that other things he said turned out to be true. 

She said he demonstrated in a swimming pool how they were trained to swim silently when he was an assassin during the war.

There's a scholarly article somewhere online arguing that Wood was an auteur. It wasn't many years after the war that he started writing scripts and, the writer said, nearly all of his scripts involved people rising from the dead in one way or another. It argued that this came from Wood's feelings about having killed men in combat.

Just "recovering bodies on Betio" would have been traumatic enough for most people. Even if he wasn't the killing machine he claimed to have been, the article could have been on the right track.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

My mother wanted to watch a movie. I clicked on the Criterion Channel. I suggested The Incredible Shrinking Man.

She wasn't interested. I fast forwarded into it. There the guy was, three feet tall, standing on a scale in the doctor's office. It was a rather striking image, something you'd never see in real life. I pointed out that the doctor was Mr Drysdale from The Beverly Hillbillies, but she still wasn't interested.

"He's shrinking! How can you be so indifferent?"

The last time I watched The Incredible Shrinking Man was about 35 years ago after I was stung by a hornet. I was up all night in pain trying to keep an icepack on it. In the early morning, I drifted in and out of sleep with the movie on TV.

I fast forwarded some more.

"Look! They think the cat ate him so they moved out of the house and he's there alone fighting for his life!"

Seems like they would have wanted the cat put to sleep anyway. Couldn't they have had the vet perform a necropsy and check the contents of its stomach? Surely they wouldn't keep the cat after it ate a man, especially a family member, and they'd want the man's remains for burial.

She still had no interest at all in it so we watched All the President's Men again.

Nostromo, Joseph Conrad, David Lean

From Jeffrey St. Clair on Counterpunch:

+ It’s so often the case that people who learned English as adults speak and write it more gracefully than native speakers? Look at Conrad, who published his first novel only 10 years after teaching himself English. No one has written more complex or elegant sentences.

+ Speaking of Conrad, some people continue to argue that David Lean’s plan to film Nostromo is one of the greatest unmade films. Having just re-read Nostromo, I voice my dissent. When it comes to novels that are driven by language and ideas, the best films are the ones that remain unmade. Moreover, Lean’s grasp of the consequences of the imperial project is primitive at best and indulgent at worst. Would he have cast Alec Guiness (who’d already played a Saudi in Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and an Indian scholar in Passage to India) in brownface once again for the role of Avellanos, Hernandez or Montero?

+ In any event, there’s an excellent Italo-English miniseries with a multi-racial and ethnic cast to fill the gap, which is, typically, only available on YouTube. (It enjoys the additional allure of a propulsive score by Morricone the Great.)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/01/roaming-charges-it-is-what-it-is-but-is-that-that-all-there-is/

Klute, 1971

I wish they had given Jane Fonda's character a better name than "Bree Daniels". They reportedly had a prostitute as a technical adviser on the set and Fonda modeled her performance after some prostitutes she knew in France. She plays a middle-class college educated high priced call girl/actress/model undergoing psychoanalysis.  

Donald Sutherland got the good name. He plays John Klute, a uniformed cop from Pennsylvania. He says he's never investigated a missing persons case or spent time in New York, but goes there to try to find out what happened to a wealthy executive he was somehow friends with. 

Jane Fonda sort of bothered me in this, but she got an Oscar for it, so what do I know.

Part of Alan Pakula's "Paranoia Trilogy" along with The Parallax View and All the President's Men. 

With Roy Scheider. 

Jean Stapleton, TV's Edith Bunker, was completely convincing in a small role.

Available on the Criterion Channel.