Armie Hammer, three day movies, etc

I quit paying attention to the accusations against Armie Hammer after the cannibalism stuff. And that, I assume, was strictly fantasy. I prefer to think that if he were to actually attempt it, he would be turned off to the whole idea of cannibalism, but I may be overly optimistic. It may be that his movie career is the one thing keeping him from becoming an actual cannibal in which case we should keep him working. But I keep being surprised that celebrities with so much to lose still commit horrible crimes. And I guess Hammer's been accused of some other, more quotidian sex crimes and abuse.

I read that there are companies that produce three-day movie---movies filmed in just three days---and one of them keeps using the same actor to star in each one. They use an actor who was sort of known but whose career hasn't gone well and has been reduced to this. But he's still a movie star this way.

I'd like to see them, but the book I saw this mentioned in didn't name names. I don't know who the actor is, what the movies are or what company produces them. I could go to Wal-Mart and pick out their cheapest DVD's and hope I land on one, but I'm not going in there until I get my second shot of vaccine, and even then I don't like the place. For one thing, there are always lines. They won't open enough registers to speed things up.

Yes, that's right. I've been to Wal-mart. Had to go there buy a cheap cell-phone. I figured if young people ever mocked me for using a flip-phone, I'd tell them it was the phone favored by criminals because you could pay for them anonymously.

These three-day movies are like everything else I want to see and can't. There were silent movies still being made in Burma at least until the 1970's, silent movies made in Thailand until the late '60's, silent movies made in 16mm color in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1950's.

On the other hand, I did finally see some Nollywood movies and was disappointed. And I saw a couple of Jim Wynorski's semi-pornographic R-rated three-day movies and they weren't interesting.

My point was going to be that Armie Hammer can still be a movie star at a very low level if he wants. None of these disgraced actors will do it, though.

"Why Hollywood Won't Stop Making Some Foreign Countries Look Awful"

From Mashable: 

It's not just in your head. We talked to filmmakers, colorists, and pop culture experts about why Hollywood keeps using weird color filters to depict certain countries. 

Thomasine and Bushrod (1974)

A western set in 1910. A Black couple robs rich white capitalists and gives to the Black, Mexican and Indian poor. It was intended as an answer to Bonnie & Clyde, except Bonnie and Clyde never did anything for anyone and no one was ever rude to them. The wealthy "victims" in this thing were really asking for it.

I never understood why anyone would want to ride a horse and I always felt sorry for animals in westerns, so it was nice that they mostly drove cars. Made in 1974. The Model T's might have been less than fifty-years-old but I don't think that means they were as easy to get as a 1970 Ford would be now. They had a Mercer Runabout, an early sports car, which seemed surprisingly rugged.

They were armed with what I think were European revolvers. It helped distinguish it from other westerns although a machine gun wouldn't have hurt anything. There were only two of them and they were at a terrible disadvantage.

It may have been a mistake making the main characters too admirable. It just didn't seem violent enough. Or maybe just the heroes weren't violent enough. Two children are found lynched in an early scene. Thomasine and Bushrod should have been avenging angels.

Directed by Gordon Parks, Jr. Starring Max Julien and Vonetta McGee.

The Anti-Asian racism of Mia Farrow and her supporters

With the mass murder in Atlanta and the increase in hate crimes against Asians, there's been some discussion in the press about the extent of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. and how it's been ignored. Mia Farrow and her supporters are pretty obvious examples.

Here's a video on the subject with a link to the website:

https://woodyallenmoblynching.com/dylan-farrow-racist/

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Otto Preminger's controversial courtroom drama. An Army guy pleads temporary insanity after murdering a man who raped his wife. Contained words never before heard in movies approved by the motion picture code, such as "contraceptive" and "spermatogenesis". There's also a scene where the judge and attorneys agree to refer to the woman's underpants as "panties" which causes laughter from Beavis & Butthead-like courtroom observers.

The movie followed real courtroom procedure. It wasn't like Perry Mason where the attorney was solving a mystery, but it still seemed contrived. Things went the defense's way arbitrarily. For example, when a jailhouse snitch testifies, it turns out he had a long criminal record that included convictions for voyeurism and indecent exposure. Then the prosecution complete misunderstands a defense witness's relationship with the victim and looks like an idiot. It was the opposite of The Verdict where nothing goes right for Paul Newman.

On the other hand, it was based on a novel by a state supreme court justice based on a case in which he was defense attorney.

The judge was played by Joseph Welch, the lawyer in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. He was the HAVE-YOU-NO-SHAME guy who brought down McCarthy.

This is the movie that traumatized George C. Scott. He was nominated for an Oscar, he worried about it, dreaded the ceremony, then he didn't win anyway. He decided to never go through that again and never picked up his Oscar for Patton.

With James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazerra; Orson Bean, Eve Arden and Murray Hamilton.

George Segal, 87, RIP

 

George Segal has died at 87.

I've been watching him lately on re-runs of The Goldbergs. I looked at his filmography on IMDb and was surprised that he was the voice of Johnny Quest's father on a more recent version of that series and that most of what I remember him from---The Hot Rock, Fun with Dick and Jane, Rollercoaster, The Black Bird, A Touch of Class among others---were made over a period of seven or eight years. 

A Canadian thriller called Russian Roulette was in there somewhere. It impressed me at the time, but I think I may have only seen the trailer.

Murder, My Sweet (1944)

My great-grandmother knew Dick Powell's mother. They were mountain women from Arkansas. I went back to my ancestral home about fifteen years ago and there was the house where Powell grew up in Mountain View. I stopped and gazed at it, but that was about all you could do. There was a sign in front, but they weren't offering tours and there wouldn't have been much to see if they did.

When he starred in Murder, My Sweet, Powell was getting too old for the song and dance roles he played before that. There's a scene in this movie where a woman slips into his one room apartment while he's standing at the sink.

"You have a nice build for a private detective," she said.

"It gets me around," he says.

Which was sort of funny because he looked like a middle-aged guy in a t-shirt. 

In fairness, by normal human standards, he looked pretty fit for a guy who was 39 or 40. He wasn't a body-builder like all the actors now and his t-shirt might not have been as flattering as modern t-shirts, but he looked perfectly healthy.

Based on a Raymond Chandler novel. I liked the way Philip Marlow would jump to conclusions on little evidence.

Directed by Edward Dmytryk. He gave fellow Ukrainian Mike Mazurki a role as a big giant ex-convict looking for his old girlfriend. 

I watched it with my mother. It made no sense to her. She was amused and a perhaps a little insulted that the frail old man in it was only 65 which isn't that much older than I am. I'm the one who should have been insulted. He goes to take a nap while his wife hits on Powell. The way they drink and smoke in this thing, no wonder he was a physical wreck. Powell himself died of lung cancer at 58 although the two Ukrainians lived to old age.

Harakiri (Japan, 1962)

Years ago, I was sitting in the university library. I wasn't a student and couldn't check out books, so I sat a table and read the novel Compulsion based on the 1924 Leopold & Loeb case. When I was done, I wanted to read more about it. I put in a request that the library buy a copy of Nathan Leopold's memoir, Life Plus 99 Years, and they ordered the book for $50---about $100 today.

The library had no Chicago newspapers, so I read about it in the New York Times on microfilm.

Leopold & Loeb were boy geniuses. The newspapers back then didn't know how to refer to them except as "advanced thinkers". When a reporter asked them for some other term they could use, Nathan Leopold suggested "Nietzschean Colossus".

It was interesting, but I got distracted and started reading other news from that time.

Even a respectable newspaper like the New York Times still hated Germans. They ran an adorable picture of naked four-year-old German boy sitting in a little chair. He had won a child beauty contest. The newspaper dismissed this as a German trick to appear less evil.

Mussolini had a socialist leader murdered, a New York City cop chased children out of an abandoned building by firing his gun and killed a six-year-old. A group of children took a car on a joyride and ran over another cop's foot. They also reported the murder of a young boy. They didn't catch the killer at the time, but I recognized the case. The murderer was serial killer/cannibal Albert Fish who was executed twelve years later.

A French inventor was sailing to America to sell the U.S. military a Death Ray. This was big news for several days. French officials had already passed on it. I realized I had seen the Death Ray at "The Museum of the Fantastic" in eastern Oregon when I was nine. If you pushed a button it would blow warm air you. The museum no longer exists.

The U.S. banned Japanese immigration to the United States in May, 1924. In protest, a man wearing a business suit and no shoes climbed over the wall of the U.S. embassy in Tokyo and committed seppuku----harakiri---on embassy grounds.

If you're going to kill yourself as an act of protest, that might not be a bad way to do it. It had to be traumatic for the people working there.

Which brings us to this. HaraKiri (Japan, 1962). Starring Tatsuya Nakadai.

Set in 1630. Japan is at peace and full of unemployed samurai. Tired of living in poverty, a middle-aged samurai comes to what they call a castle and asks for help committing ritual suicide. They tell him about he last guy who did that----a young samurai asked for a place to commit suicide but really just wanted a hand-out so they forced him to kill himself anyway.

It turns out the older samurai is there for revenge.

I found the harakiri scene in flashback too hard to watch.

I saw this movie at the university back then. It was only about 20-years-old at the time. They were apparently showing it for a film class. They handed out a photocopied flier as you went in. The professor wrote that the movie was a little slow but had an ending worth waiting for.

I don't know if the samurai code of honor was a real thing. In the end, it shows the futility of violent individual action, even if you're very, very good at it. You want to change anything, it takes mass organization.

Available now on the Criterion channel.

Guy Maddin, Archangel (1990)

I heard an interview with Guy Maddin once. He said he plunged into depression after reading comments about his movies on the internet. The people who liked him depressed him as much as those who hated him. He referred to people of my ilk as "basement boys".

It doesn't matter. He won't do that again. His life isn't perfect enough? Let him walk a mile in my moccasins.

Maddin tends to film on elaborate indoor sets, presumably because he's in Winnipeg, one of the coldest cities on Earth. Archangel resembled an early Soviet sound film, although it was pro-Czar, about a Canadian soldier in Russia during World War One fighting both Germans and Bolsheviks. There were scenes where there was no sound but scattered lines of dialog. No actual jokes, but very funny at times.

A cowardly, mortally wounded father turns into a veritable Siberian tiger when Bolshoviks attack his family. People die in combat and their ghosts rise from their bodies.

There was an old western Ed Wood directed. He didn't have a coffin for a funeral scene, so he used a cardboard box which looked ridiculous. In this movie, they had small urns containing cremated remains which seemed weirdly plausible.

Lost love, amnesia, child discipline, burial at sea, prosthetic limbs. Huns, Communists, Czarists. Bizarre folk remedies.

78 minutes, available on the Criterion Channel.

Walk on the Wild Side (1962)

I keep waking up at three or four in the morning so I turned this on on The Criterion Channel. I may have missed some things, like how Lawrence Harvey goes from a guy hitchhiking his way to Louisiana to owning a suit. I thought the lesson was to not pine for your old girlfriends who you haven't heard from in years because she probably moved on to better things, but, no, that wasn't entirely the case here.

American-born Ukrainian Edward Dmytryk cast British-born Lithuanian Lawrence Harvey as a nice guy hitchhiking from Texas to New Orleans in the early '30's to find his lost love (Capucine). He meets teen runaway Jane Fonda and travels with her until she steals from Anne Baxter running a roadside cafe and he sends her on her way.

Turns out Harvey's old girlfriend is now a prostitute working in a brothel run by Miss Barbara Stanwyk. And brothels are run by horrible people.

There's a nice scene where Harvey confronts a street preacher attacking him and Capucine.

Mark Cousins' Women Make Film

It was interesting but not THAT interesting. The purpose was to cover the art and craft of film through the work of women directors rather than to focus on unique qualities of women filmmakers or to lament that women have been shut out of directing.

Women directors, it turns out, are about the same as men. The main difference may be that they're more willing to endanger child actors. There was a Soviet woman who filmed three frightened children walking around on the roof of a high-rise apartment building. A Spanish woman directed a scene of three boys pooping in a railroad tunnel.

It's a shame there aren't more women directors, but from the viewers' end, we may not be missing much. Think of all the "chick flicks" that were directed by men. The movies directed by women, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, American Psycho or the pro-war torture films of Kathryn Bigelow, aren't much improvement over what the men do.

 

Hollywood gets support from local, state and federal governments. They should make some demands, like employing women and minority filmmakers in proportion to the population.

Fourteen episodes, each about an hour long. Narrated by Tilda Swinton, Jane Fonda, Adjoa Andoh, Sharmila Tagore, Kerry Fox, Thandie Newton and Debra Winger. Available on The Criterion Channel.

Short films by Guy Maddin

 

"Glorious"

They have a number of Guy Maddin films featured on The Criterion Channel included some short films.

The movies are in high contrast black and white, filmed in very short takes, like a Soviet Experimental film. They're beautiful to watch and I got the vague impression of a storyline, but I have serious limitations trying to write about it.

I have one on now. Started as sort of gangster movie. People with guns looking out the windows of a house at night as police gather outside.

Then we see a guy sleeping. He dreams of his naked father. I assume it's his father. Maybe it's some other naked old guy.

There was more stuff. Ends with the naked old guy performing oral acts of love on mercifully fake penises poking through holes in a wall. Hence the title.

I hope it doesn't matter that I gave away the ending.

One time I had a break at work. I sat there watching a Guy Maddin film on YouTube. Someone came up to talk to me so I hit pause, but realized I paused it on an image that was rather objectionable. The person either didn't notice or decided not to denounce me right there on the spot.

"Night Mayor"

With this movie, I read the Criterion Channel's description first. It explained that it was about an inventor who makes a television powered by the Aurora Borealis which broadcasts across Canada.

I marveled that they were able to discern a storyline to one of these things, but it turned out the film had a running narration explaining it.

I think I would have liked it better with the explanation but without the narration.

Infamous (2006)

Truman Capote researches In Cold Blood. Hangs around with mass murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock in prison. He wins people over, cop and killer alike, with stories about working with Humphrey Bogart when he worked as a writer on Beat the Devil. 

Covers the same ground as Capote (2005). It seems less serious in the beginning. Truman Capote (Toby Jones) is more cartoonish at first. In Kansas, people reasonably mistake him for a woman. But it turns much more grim than the other film.

Look for Peter Bogdanovich and Jeff Daniels. With Sigourney Weaver, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sandra Bullock, Isabella Rossellini, Daniel Craig as Perry Smith, Lee Pace as Dick Hickock.

Certain Women (2016)

 

Kelly Reichardt directed. Based on short stories by Maile Meloy. 

Like Reichardt's other movies, it's slow but not at all dull.

It annoyed Jon Jost that people told him that Kelly Reichardt's work was similar to his. He later attacked her movie, Meek's Cutoff, which I thought was great. Here, Reichardt films in Montana in the same territory--or at least the same state--where Jost has made a couple movies.

A woman lawyer's male client has no respect for her but she has to put on a bulletproof vest and diffuse a situation he creates.

A woman and her husband buy sandstone from an old man played by the late René Auberjonois living alone in a house in the Montana countryside. Very different from other roles I've seen him in.

A young woman, Jamie, works as a ranch hand and wanders into an evening class on school law being taught by young attorney Beth. Jamie goes to the class each week and goes to a diner with Beth afterward and watches her eat. It meant more to one than the other.

With Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, Lily Gladstone, James LeGros and Jared Harris.

Available on the Criterion Channel, IFC and AMC and you can pay to see it on Vudu or Amazon.

To Die For (1995)

 

Comedy/drama based loosely on the Pamela Smart case. Nicole Kidman desperately wants to be a TV newscaster. She's not terribly bright, but is actually pretty good when she starts doing weather reports on a local cable station. When her husband (Matt Dillon) hinders her hypothetical career, she seduces a high school boy who she coaxes into murdering him

Written by Buck Henry. Not a mockumentary but with elements of it, with flash-forwards and characters speaking to the camera about the case.

Buck Henry also plays a high school teacher who roughs up one of the kids. Even a kid who goes on to be a murderer will let himself be smacked around by a teacher.

Directed by Gus Van Sant. Wayne Knight as the guy in charge of the local station. With Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck and George Segal.

Free on Pluto.

Might make a double feature with The Color Wheel about a young woman with a similar goal and little chance of success.

If you want to work in TV news at a very low level, I hear you can get a job as studio camera operator pretty easily. It's reportedly a terrible job, minimum wage, you have to work a split shift---do the evening news then come back at 11:00---and it's still not full time. But that's good because there's a very high turnover. If you need experience, you can get it at the Community Access station. That's where I heard about it.

I've told unemployed film schoolers this. I don't know if it would be a way to get their foot in the door, if it could lead to bigger things, but they were applying for fast food jobs and getting nowhere. I don't know why none of them did it. 

Ratings continue to drop on the HBO "documentary", Farrow v. Allen.

Again, from Showbiz 411:

There’s been a decline in interest every week since the series, made by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, began three weeks ago. This week’s episode should show even fewer viewers as it has no revelations or invented facts to present. The fourth episode is just Ronan Farrow crabbing about Woody Allen’s former publicist, and others kvetching about nothing.

Indeed, Dick and Ziering have run out of steam. Since they refused to make a balanced film, or entertain any other ideas, or explore Mia Farrow’s crazy, suicidal, criminal family, they have nothing left to say.

HBO is taking a bath with this series. Just a few months ago, they had Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant pulling a million viewers in for “The Undoing.” Now they’ve squandered this valuable real estate on junk.

The real meanness here is what should be discussed: how Mia Farrow turned Dylan into a professional victim for the rest of her life, how Mia hates Soon Yi enough to try and destroy her as well as Woody, and their college age daughters. Mia has no love for any of these people. She’s just wallowed in spite for almost 30 years.

Harry & Meghan interview

 

It sounds interesting. The British Royal Family is worse than most of us imagined. Of course, Harry was no picnic either. He told an interviewer that killing Afghans from the safety of his helicopter was fun because it was like a video game. Meghan Markle can't be much of a prize marrying that borderline human. 

Harry stomped out of England in a huff but he's still just the acorn. You have to look at the hideously twisted, racist oak from which he fell. After Diana died, people kept calling William "Pugsly", arguing that he may seem fine now, but how could he come out of that family as anything but the monster we now know him to be?

I still don't think I'll watch the interview. There's got to be a YouTube video showing just the highlights.

Murder Among the Mormons

I canceled Netflix but still have time left on it. Oprah's two hour interview with "Prince" Harry and Meghan Markle was on, but I didn't think I could stand it, so I watched this instead. I had read a book about it called Salamander, so I knew about the case. There weren't any surprises except that the cops weren't nearly as on-the-ball as I thought.

Utah police suspected a somewhat innocent Mormon guy of the murders because they found a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook when they searched his basement. And a submachine gun. So they had very good reason to suspect him.

I had a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook when I was in high school. I bought it strictly as a novelty. I had zero interest in drugs and explosives would have terrified me. My guess was that the author had come up with a pretty good title and decided his work was done because there was nothing in the book that should have alarmed or been of any use to anyone. I had read a couple books from the school library advocating gun control that provided far more troubling information, like how to make a zip gun. 

So, the documentary was about a case in the '80's. A Mormon who had secretly become an atheist makes a lot of money as a documents forger while undermining the church with what he claimed were early Mormon documents. 

Oh, and then he uses bombs to murder three people when his enterprise starts falling apart.

"Prince" Harry, Meghan Markle

"Trouble with England, it's all pomp and no circumstance. You're very wise to get out of it, escape while you can."

--Humphrey Bogart as Billy Dannreuther in Beat the Devil (1953)

Some new movie about Napoleon

 From Counterpunch:

The Unbearable Magic of Hollywood Casting: I see Ridley Scott has cast the great Jodie Comer to play Josephine to Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon in the curiously titled “Kitbag.” Josephine was 7 years older than Napoleon and Phoenix is 20 years older than Comer. (I wonder if Comer knows that by the time Napoleon married Josephine, she’d lost most of her teeth & the ones that remained were black and cavity-snaggled, owing to her habit of sucking sugar cubes, which acquired as a young girl on the family’s sugarcane plantation in Martinique…) It wasn’t the great romance it’s been made out to be. Josephine, as Napoleon insisted on calling the woman everyone else knew as Rose, hopped into bed with one of NB’s arch rivals, Barras, about five minutes after he left for his Italian campaign, which was about 5 minutes after they got married, which was about 4.5 minutes longer than sex with Napoleon lasted, according to even his own self-flattering accounts. He was, as he boasted, a busy man. 

Young Ahmed (Belgium, 2019)

It seems insane to demonize well-behaved children, but look at all the things---Tom Sawyer for one---where bratty kids are the heroes and obedient children are actual villains. There was a Danish sit-com on Netflix where a free-spirited teacher calls a girl a Nazi because she does her homework and tries to do well in school.

On the other hand, Young Ahmed is about a dyslexic tween who is deeply religious, has a strong sense of morality and likes to please at least some of the grown-ups. He's a member of a fundamentalist Wahhabi mosque and tries to murder his teacher for heresy.

There was no harm done and the court sends him to an honor farm. Normally, they'd probably WANT a juvenile delinquent to find religion. In this case, they should get him to loosen up, but in one scene, when he wants to go someplace with a girl he's made friends with, they remind him it's almost time for his afternoon prayers.

Available on the Criterion Channel. Directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won Best Director at Cannes.

Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Timothee Chalamet was terribly thin. There wasn't much meat on those bones, which in real life would be a deal-breaker for Armie Hammer. You know. Because of the cannibalism thing.

When I was in high school, I knew kids from families like the one in this movie. The fathers and in some cases the mothers were university professors, the parents encouraged those artistic interests that could get their kids into college and the children would freely swear and talk about sex in front of them.

In this movie, Chalamet plays classical piano and cheerfully tells his father he came that close to having sex with his girlfriend, but he keeps his relationship with Hammer a secret.

I don't know what the two saw in each other. Neither one of them was likable or pleasant.

Made for three million dollars. They get more for their money in Europe, but they filmed mostly around the villa.

In the end, it turns out that Chalamet's father was hip to what he and Hammer had been up to. If I understood him correctly, he tells his son that it was good that he got to be some guy's love object. He says he missed his own chance when he was young and that when you hit middle age, no one wants anything to do with you sex-wise. 

It made me think of the French movie Young and Beautiful. A bourgeois high school girl is forced to give up prostitution when an old rich guy dies on her. She talks to his widow (Charlotte Rampling) who says that she wishes she had been a prostitute when she was young.