The scourge of subtitles

Every time you want to watch a foreign film in this country, you're forced to read about 90 pages of dialog. You have to have your eyes glued to the screen every second. You can't get a dubbed version of anything.

Jacques Tati filmed simultaneous versions of Mon Oncle in French and English and Werner Herzog filmed Nosferatu in both German and English, but, as far as I can tell, only the subtitled versions are now available. There's no argument for that. The preference for subtitles when there's an identical English language version with the original cast doing their own live dialog is purely an affectation.

I talked to a kid in Russia a few years ago. I wish I had stayed in touch with him. He wanted to learn English well enough to translate movies. The Soviet Union was never part of the International Copyright Convention and people there still aren't shy about copyright infringement. The kid was talking about doing underground, unauthorized translations of movies that would otherwise be unavailable to them. I hear that's a popular thing there.

That's what we need in this country. Just record the dialog separately and play it while you watch the movie.

Doing a fake dubbed version of these things wouldn't be that hard, would it? You'd need a couple of people to simply read the subtitles into a microphone as they watch the movie. In Russia and other eastern European countries, the dubbed version is only one voice translating the whole thing.

Look at the movie Mr Arkadin. Orson Welles dubbed several of the voices. You don't need that many.

We just need some brave individuals, maybe some destitute, judgement-proof cineastes with nothing to lose, to do some recordings the rest of us could freely enjoy.

Of course, cineastes who don't like subtitles might be hard to find.

The China Syndrome (1979)

42 years ago, my sister and her friend dragged me off to see Dawn of the Dead. We went in a few minutes late. The violence was already in full swing. I understand why they didn't like it, but I was surprised that they thought it was "too scary" rather than just disgusting or repulsive or not to their liking. They wanted to leave and didn't ask me. We walked out and went to The China Syndrome next door.

It was 1979, before video took over. Michael Douglas plays a TV news cameraman filming in 16mm. He uses a CP16 "self-blimped" camera ($500 on eBay). 

The camera must have run without making a sound because Douglas is able to film the nuclear power plant control room without anyone noticing. There to do a puff piece, he and Jane Fonda watch Jack Lemmon, Wilford Brimley and others barely avert a nuclear meltdown.

Soon, the power company's private security is after them trying to keep them quiet.

One thing that stood out to me is how well a Chevy Vega held up in a serious accident. Japanese cars were death traps back then and the early Volkswagen Rabbit Jane Fonda drove couldn't have been much better. The Vega got a bad rap. Jack Lemmon later evades company goons in a BMW 2002.

There were some shots of the power plant that were clearly matte paintings.

The incident portrayed in the movie where a stuck needle on a gauge caused engineers to misread water levels actually happened in a nuclear power plant near Chicago. And the film was released twelve days before the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island which some people thought was more than a coincidence.

A serious thriller that went overboard at the end.

HBO Farrow v Allen "documentary"

Ronan Farrow today and what he'll look like in 40 years.

I did kind of wonder about this. Woody Allen is no Michael Jackson. He has a small following that hasn't changed much over the years, and unless you watch his movies, you probably haven't seen Mia Farrow in anything since the 1970's. I saw her in Dark Horse (2011), and I know she's been in other things, like a remake of The Omen.

From Showbiz 411:

HBO’s “Allen v. Farrow” was a ratings bust on Sunday night. Total viewers came to 394,000. The one sided, poorly fact checked hour lost to everything on cable TV including a Weather Channel special. It even lost to a preview of The Walking Dead. The audience rejected part 1 of rehashed, manipulated material.

Got to cancel Netflix

I really need to cancel Netflix. I can't find anything on there I want to see and when I do, it's on Amazon anyway.

And there's this tweet from A.S. Hamrah:

Number of films by these directors currently streaming on Netflix: 

Billy Wilder 0 

Ida Lupino 0 

George Cukor 0 

Gillo Pontecorvo 0 

Elaine May 0 

Edward D. Wood, Jr. 0 

Sam Levinson 1

 

Downhill aka When Boys Leave Home (UK, 1927)

Ivor Novello was born in 1893, meaning he was in his mid-30's when he starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Downhill. It's always a little disturbing to see a grown man dressed in uniform playing a teenager in an English boarding school. Thank God there was no caning.

Hitchcock was a couple of years younger than Ivor. He could have played one of the children himself.

Ivor's best friend impregnates a girl who names him (Ivor) as the culprit because he has a rich father. He's expelled from school, his father throws him out of the house and he proceeds to have a more interesting life than he would have otherwise enjoyed. Which explains why they cast a guy in his 30's to play a schoolboy. It was either that or cast a teenager to eventually play an aging male escort charging by the dance in a French music hall.

Shows one advantage to silent film. The movie had a sexually active teenager's friend named as an unwed father without ever spelling it out. The intertitles only hinted at it. I don't know how open-minded British censors were back then, but that probably helped slip it past them.

110 minutes

They have a good print of it on the Criterion channel.

More on the Mia Farrow HBO doc

But they look so sincere!

Woody Allen and Soon-yi Previn's official response to the HBO "documentary" Farrow v Allen:

These documentarians had no interest in the truth. Instead, they spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods. Woody and Soon-Yi were approached less than two months ago and given only a matter of days ‘to respond.’ Of course, they declined to do so.

As has been known for decades, these allegations are categorically false. Multiple agencies investigated them at the time and found that, whatever Dylan Farrow may have been led to believe, absolutely no abuse had ever taken place. It is sadly unsurprising that the network to air this is HBO – which has a standing production deal and business relationship with Ronan Farrow. While this shoddy hit piece may gain attention, it does not change the facts.

 

I got this from Roger Friedman's Showbiz 411 website.

 

Friedman goes on to write:

The business deal mentioned above was indeed announced in 2018 between HBO and Ronan Farrow, who’s come up with no ideas for a documentary except this one. This is his obsession, and his mother’s. Watching the first episode tonight, it’s obvious that Dylan has been heavily coached, that nothing they talk about makes sense.

Friedman also reveals that HBO used clips from Allen's films and excerpts from the audio version of his memoir without permission:

In other words, Kirby and Dick and HBO figured they’d just use Woody’s words, claim fair use, and see if anyone sues them. Ditto the licenses for clips of Woody’s movies.

 

He notes that Michael Jackson's estate is suing HBO after they did the same thing in their Leaving Neverland doc. 

Zachary Ty Bryan sentenced

Former child actor Zachary Ty Bryan has been sentenced to three years probation for strangling his girlfriend.

They let him plead guilty to "Menacing" and "Assault in the Fourth Degree". They dropped charges of "Strangulation", "Coercion", "Interference with Making a Police Report", "Harassment" and additional charges of "Menacing" and "Assault".

They should order him not to leave the state. He could do commercials, industrial films, zero budget movies, community theater. He could be a major figure in regional cinema.

Journey to the Beginning of Time (Czechoslovakia, 1955)

I started watching this and realized I had seen it on TV when I was six or eight. I lived in San Antonio, Texas, at the time. It was around 1970 at the height of the Cold War and San Antonio was home of the Fourth Army. They showed this movie a few minutes at a time mixed in with Popeye and old Warner Brothers cartoons.

We were in a city where we were forced to pray in public school and where the Fourth Army was training troops bound for Vietnam, but they showed a movie about evolution made in a Communist country on a local children's show.

Four boys go through a tunnel in their rowboat and find themselves in the ice age. They continue down the river going further and further back in time as they go. They see older and older animals and plants.

With stop motion animation. I think the duck-billed dinosaur was a puppet and they used a different method for some shots of the brontosaurus.

There's a scene where a kid runs for his life from a giant flightless bird.

They had one of those birds in a Ray Harryhausen movie, Mysterious Island. I saw that movie as a kid and thought it was a giant baby bird. I felt sorry for it because the guys killed and ate it, but seeing it in this movie, I'm back on the side of humanity.

The movie made little attempt to explain how any of this was happening. The kid at the beginning commented that something similar happened in a Jules Verne novel and other stuff he wrote about came true, so why shouldn't this?

Available on the Criterion Channel.

That TV channel back then serialized another cartoon from another Communist country where they explore the solar system. I thought it was Soviet but I looked for it and didn't find it.

When I was fourteen or fifteen, they kept showing a movie called Voyage to to the Edge of Universe (1963) which was a Czechoslovakian film called Icarie XB1 before it was butchered by American International Pictures.

There was also The First Spaceship on Venus available on Pub-D-Hub, a Poland-East German co-production.

There were other Soviet movies that were cut up by American International Pictures with new footage added. I don't remember seeing any of them, but there were one or two made from footage from Planet of Storms (aka Planeta Bur, USSR, 1962). One was something about a planet of prehistoric women.

Americans should be ashamed. It'd be like if some other backward, degenerate country chopped up 2001: A Space Odyssey and turned it into a nudie film.

 

Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Corpse

"Some of you may recall that Limbaugh had a recurring segment in the 1980s where he’d mockingly read off the names of people who’d died of AIDS, while Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” played in the background…"

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/19/roaming-charges-notes-from-the-ice-house/

Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948)

Based on a 1929 play that was inspired by the 1924 Leopold and Loeb case.

A couple of wealthy, apparently gay aesthetes murder a classmate before throwing a party to which they've invited the victim's parents and their old boarding school teacher, a crude Nietzschean played by James Stewart.  The teacher regales the others with his view of murder as an art form.

Hitchcock tried to make it look like it was filmed one continuous take. It didn't work very well. That guy who directed 1917 should do a remake.

I'll give away the ending here. 

This likely worked better on stage than in a movie, but Jimmy Stewart instantly turns against all of his long-held views when he discovers the crime. Killing people is bad! He fires a gun out the window to bring the police.

But Stewart hasn't completely reformed. He gloats that his former students will likely be sentenced to death. "You're going to DIE, Cameron!"

Leopold & Loeb themselves were sentenced to life plus 99 years. Three other movies inspired by their case are Compulsion (1959), Murder by Numbers (2002) and the New Queer Cinema's Swoon (1992).

When I was a kid in the '70's, there was an independent TV station that would show Compulsion a couple of times a year. It taught me that even pitiful people might kill you.

Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)

18th century home they bulldoze to make room.

Cary Grant as a New York advertising executive. He and wife Myrna Loy build a house in Connecticut. Not really funny. Never becomes cartoonish like The Money Pit or Green Acres or even Newhart. They're not robbed and cheated by greedy locals, but it does cost more than they anticipate.

Reviews of HBO's Mia Farrow doc

Mia Farrow with her friends Roman Polanski and Joan Crawford.

 

I've seen a couple of reviews of the HBO "documentary" about Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. Most of them took it for granted that the accusation against Allen was true. They didn't seem to know anything about it. One noted that he "was never convicted" but didn't mention that he was never charged and that investigators concluded the accusations were false. 

Dylan, by the way, had until she was 22 to pursue charges against him and didn't do it. She can still sue. The burden of proof would be far lower, but she won't even do that because she knows she has no case.

But here's link to Roger Friedman's scathing review:

https://www.showbiz411.com/2021/02/17/hbo-doc-about-woody-allen-mia-farrow-ignores-mias-3-dead-kids-her-child-molester-brother-other-family-tragedies

From the article:

Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick made this series, and it’s a disappointment that they’ve been sucked into Farrow’s now almost 30 year vendetta against Woody Allen. But what you get out of it, surprisingly, is how much Mia hates Soon Yi, the girl she adopted who took up with Woody at age 18 and is still with him three decades later. Mia’s scorched Earth approach to Soon Yi should be the takeaway here. Soon Yi and Woody have been together since 1992. They have raised two daughters, now in college. And yet Mia will do anything she can to destroy Soon Yi. Mia Farrow is the most scorned lover in history. And don’t you forget it.

...

The perfect Farrow family is a continuing theme throughout the four episodes. But that’s been scotched in real life by Moses, who was older than both kids when all this went down. At first Moses took Mia’s side. But then as time unfolded, he came to Woody’s side. You can read his 2018 essay here. But Moses’s adult evaluation of his family, and of the whole scandal, is just dismissed by Mia, Ronan, and Dylan. It doesn’t fit in with their modus operandi, their raison d’etre.

...

Moses Farrow concluded his essay — also omitted from the series — with a note to Mia:

“I’m guessing your next step will be to launch a campaign to discredit me for speaking out. I know it comes with the territory. And it’s a burden I am willing to bear. But, after all this time, enough is enough. You and I both know the truth. And it’s time for this retribution to end.”

Before you buy into “Allen vs. Farrow” consider the sources, do the research. And take this mini series as a fictional account by a clever actress giving the performance of her life.

Capote (2005)

The story of the writing of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. 

I was about fifteen when I read the book. It seemed like something from the distant past, but Perry Smith and Richard Hickock had only been executed thirteen years earlier. The book was sympathetic to Perry Smith who had been horribly abused as a child. Hickock had a head injury which was his only excuse.

The movie Capote covers the same ground, the 1959 murder of the Clutter family, but from the point of view of Capote writing the book, so it's more upbeat. We see Capote as a raconteur and hanging around with Harper Lee.  It doesn't follow the killers; it doesn't dwell on Smith's nightmarish past.

The executions in In Cold Blood were deeply disturbing. In Capote they were kind of a relief.

An advantage of aging

Late middle age is great.

I had to go buy some chocolate. My own purchase was unrelated to Valentine's Day, but there was a long, long line of people waiting to get into the place.

Some big ape without a mask and his girlfriend got in line behind me. They were standing way too close. I told them to back away. The guy smirked and wasn't moving so I used what police call their "command voice" and told them to get back six feet.

He asked if I was going to stand six feet back from the people ahead of me.

"GET BACK AND I WILL," I said.

They backed up.

"We're all gonna die, we're all gonna die," he said. I didn't respond so he said, "I'll bet he voted for Biden, too."

I still didn't respond so they shut up.

I don't think I'd have done that thirty years ago.

Of course, there was no pandemic thirty years ago, but you know what I mean.

The Story of Children and Film (Mark Cousins 2013)

Documentary about children in world cinema. Discuses the similar ways childhood is portrayed.

Starts with home video footage of Cousins' niece and nephew playing with an elaborate British marble-rolling toy. 

Clips from movies from around the globe including, unfortunately, E.T. Being from wherever it is he's from, Cousins might consider it exotic, but I've been forced to sit through it so many times. I haven't seen it in twenty years but I still can't take it.

Cousins didn't mention it, but I was amazed at how many children did their own stunts.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Larry Flynt, dead at 78

He was horrible, but he attacked Jerry Falwell and offered a cash reward for information on the sex lives of Republicans during the Clinton impeachment and he became weirdly respectable among a segment of the population. It doesn't take much.

 

Trial and Error aka Dock Brief (Peter Sellers, 1962)

It was nice for a change to see a comedy about a wife who was cheerful and happy and had more right to live than the dour, inadequate husband who murdered her.

Based on a play by John Mortimore (Rumpole of the Bailey). Peter Sellers as a failed attorney assigned the task of defending wife-killer Richard Attenborough.

Attenborough had taken in a male lodger hoping his wife would run away with him and, in flashback, this doesn't seem unreasonable.

The case is pretty open and shut and the lawyer has no real experience. They have no realistic defense and the unrealistic ones aren't funny. You have to remember that the British freely executed people back then. Even if you didn't want the guy walking around free, you didn't necessarily want him hanged.

Something you don't think that much about watching Perry Mason is how many people he no doubt sent to their deaths in prison. It's nice that he got his clients off, but how many people did he kill to do it?

Available on Pub-D-Hub.

Armie Hammer: Commercially expendable?

I read this on Forbes.com about allegations against Armie Hammer from the POV of movie producers rather than audiences.

From the article:

If Hammer were a viable “butts in the seats” movie star, someone who could either open a movie or offer added value to an already viable franchise play would be one thing. But Hammer, onscreen talent and presumed off-screen decency notwithstanding, is just one of many handsome white male actors who have been anointed the next-big-thing and have stuck around for ages despite never really delivering on that alleged promise. He is a prime example of being dubbed a movie star without ever starring in a successful mainstream movie.

...

That leaves Hammer with is the notion that he adds prestige. For example, Kevin Spacey vanished from Hollywood following accusations of sexual misconduct partially because he had long stopped being a box office draw and was only worthwhile as a prestige hire. Absent that, there was no reason to cast Spacey in your mainstream movie or awards-season vehicle. Absent that respectability, Hammer becomes just another “next Tom Cruise” who wasn’t. That doesn’t make Hammer a bad person or a bad actor. However, he was always commercially expendable.

I apparently saw Hammer in a 2005 episode of Arrested Development but I don't remember him. I don't think I want to see The Lone Ranger. I'd watch the one with Timothee Chalamet if it were free.

Maybe he could become a horror star after this. 

Kinetta (Greece, 2005)

Filmed in Greece. No dialog. I looked it up on Wikipedia which sort of explained it---three people do some things that don't make sense and they re-enact violent crimes.

All filmed with a shaky hand-held camera even though, for the most part, the camera operator was just a human tripod, standing still, panning a little but incapable of holding the camera steady.

Someone in the movie had an old Canon XL1, once on the cutting edge of prosumer technology. But the movie was shot in 35 mm, and it did look good.

From the director of Lobster and Dogtooth.

I dozed off at one point, so it's possible I slept through the part that explained everything. That's a disadvantage of streaming video.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Tourist Trap, 1979, Chuck Conners, Tanya Roberts

Rated PG. With Chuck Conners and Tanya Roberts who died last month.

My brother and his friend went to it when they were ten. I went in to get them to take them home and they weren't even in their seats. They were cowering in the aisle. They were terrified. They thought it should be rated R, and I can see how it had that effect.

The big difference between an R and a PG rating is often just nudity and obscene language and this had neither. I was disillusioned when I saw my first R-rated movies in the early days of Home Box Office. I assumed that you'd need to have at least a high school education before you could fully appreciate them, but adults were just as dumb as the rest of us.

I watched the Rifftrax version this morning. Chuck Conners operates a sinister roadside attraction.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999)

I enjoyed Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die about old people fighting zombies. And now I watched his movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. About a reasonably young hit man (Forest Whitaker) who calls himself "Ghost Dog" and is fixated on the idea of being a Samurai. He works for an aging mafioso and refers to himself as his "retainer".

I used to love samurai movies, so I understand the appeal. 

But Ghost Dog was assigned the task of killing an elderly mafioso. The other elderly mafiosi approved of the murder, but it violated their confused sense of "honor" that a Made Man was killed by someone who wasn't part of the Mafia so some old Italian men set out to murder him.

I wasn't rooting for them, but old men with guns appeal to me for some reason.

A lot better than I thought it would be.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Gus Van Sant, William Burroughs, short films

Marc Maron's interview with Gus Van Sant from his WTF podcast is on You Tube. I didn't find it very interesting. Van Sant spoke in a monotone. I was surprised that he went to the Rhode Island School of Design. Martin Mull was there at the time.

But one thing that was sort of interesting was that, early on, before anyone knew who he was, Van Sant got permission to make some short films based on the work of William S. Burroughs. He found Burroughs' phone number, called him, maybe met with him and asked if he could do it. Burroughs said he would have to call his agent. 

Short films, it turns out, have no monetary value so no one cared especially and they let him do it. I don't know if this early association with Burroughs helped him later on.

I've heard that short films are easy to get accepted by film festivals. They're the glue that holds their programs together. So, I don't know. Maybe a short film based on a literary work could be your ticket to the big time.

I don't know if the same principle was involved, but there was a guy I was slightly acquainted with in high school. He may have still been in college when he got permission to adapt some short stories by Kurt Vonnegut for the stage. And I don't know if those short plays had any role in it, but he later adapted a couple of Chaim Potok novels into stage plays. This automatically made him a major figure in Jewish theater, a big gefilte fish in a small pond so to speak.

Shia LaBeouf was a bigger jackass than I thought for plagiarizing. All he had to do was ask.

"Catching Up" (2020, 13 minutes, with Dustin Diamond)

Thirteen minute short. A girl's mother abandons her and her father to pursue a music career.

Nine years later, the girl is trying to be a singer herself, posting videos online. She says this was what her mother did rather than performing publicly and developing a local fanbase.

"Singing is the one thing you do well," her father tells her. I don't think it was intended as a backhanded compliment.

Her mother abandons her tour and rushes back to attend the school talent show when she learns that the child she abandoned is performing.

The late Dustin Diamond gives an energetic performance as MC of the talent show.

Kind of bland, I guess. It had mean girls and a nice guy teen boy.

Free with Amazon Prime.

One False Move (Carl Franklin, 1992)

Small town Arkansas police chief Bill Paxton waits for an extremely violent trio from Los Angeles to show up in town. Two members of the gang were born there and were coming home. 

In an early scene, Paxton talks on the phone with LA detectives. I don't know if the character was trying to sound folksy and Andy Griffith-like or if he couldn't help it. The detectives seem more amused than annoyed. I was just annoyed.

When Los Angeles detectives arrive, Paxton's character shows some Barney Fife-like qualities, excited to be working with police from the big city. But there's a scene where the detectives see right through him and ask how well he knew the female suspect.

I realized I had seen this thing in the 1990's. It was intended as a straight-to-video movie but turned out so well that it was released to theaters. Siskel & Ebert loved it.

Extremely violent. Stripped down plot. Starts with a mass murder.

With Billy Bob Thorton, Cynda Williams and Michael Beach. They drive a lovely early '60's Lincoln Continental which they trade in for a Ford Torino.

Written by Thornton and Tom Epperson.

Directed by Carl Franklin.

I remember Franklin from the 1977 sci-fi series The Fantastic Journey. After that, he studied directing and made four films for Roger Corman before making this movie.

The Fantastic Journey featured '70's teen sensation Ike Eisenmann who went on to work for the company that did the ADR work for this movie.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Hal Holbrook, RIP

Hal Holbrook has died at 95. 

For years, I thought he and Murray Hamilton were the same person. They had the same hair, the same voice and Holbrook played a typical Murray Hamilton character in Magnum Force which was the main thing I knew him from.

I saw him when he appeared locally performing as Mark Twain. Thank God I didn't talk to him.

Dustin Diamond, RIP

 Dustin Diamond has died at 44.

I wouldn't have done a sex tape or celebrity boxing and I would have written my tell-all book myself even if I wasn't very good at it, but, like Dustin Diamond, I would have clung to my declining career and put off getting a regular job as long as possible. The poor guy was too big to give up show business but not big enough to make a real go of it.

I spoke Spanish

I'm always feel sort of proud when I use slang without thinking. I was asking about a used car loan at the credit union. They asked if I already had a car and I said, "Yeah, but it's belly up." And there were times when I was leaving and I said I was going to split. 

When I worked at the car wash, the manager was mad that the guy didn't pull a car off the line quickly enough. I said it had a three-on-the-tree and he didn't know where first gear was. The manager was an old guy and he knew about cars but he didn't know what a three-on-the-tree was. I had to tell him it was three-speed manual transmission with the gear shift on the steering column. I think it was to make people feel better about not having a four-on-the-floor.

In a somewhat similar incident, I went though a drive-through at Taco Time last night. They had tip jar at the window. I wanted to tip 20% so I handed the women $27 on an order that was a bit over $22. It was a little too much, but I can't do math that fast and there's a pandemic. They were risking their health so I could have a chimichanga platter. She didn't want to take it. She spoke with an accent and I took her to be Latina, so I said without thinking, esta propina.

Propina means "tip". First time I ever tried communicating even in such a limited way in another language.

But as I drove home, I realized that the word "tip" has more than one meaning. Did I use the right word for "gratuity" or did I tell her it was a drill bit or the point of a pen?

I googled it. Didn't get a definitive answer. 

Okay. I just googled it again. I was right, thank God.