THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING (UK, 1964)

The description said an alien invasion, poison gas and robots. I thought it would be like War of the Worlds.

 

It's hard to imagine a more laid back movie about the extermination of all humanity. The screenwriter said that someone suggested the title as a joke and it stuck. The critic A.S. Hamrah used it for his book, The Earth Dies Streaming.

 

Starts with most of humanity dying or having died rather peacefully of an invisible poison gas. A handful of middle aged people survive in a quaint English town. Each was protected in some way, one in an oxygen tent, one couple making out in a sealed laboratory. The gas has now dissipated. I don't know why the British made a movie with an American as the hero. They're joined by a young couple fleeing to Liverpool in a stolen Vauxhall.

They break into an armory and hand out Webley revolvers, but only to the men. They gave a gun to an alcoholic who didn't know how it worked, but wouldn't give one to a woman.

Had an MGB, a Land Rover and the Vauxhall I'd have never recognized.

Black and white. 62 minutes. Available on Pub-D-Hub. 

Twenty bucks to see STILLWATER on streaming video

Matt Damon "acting".

They want $20 to see Stillwater on streaming video. According to the New York Times, it's rated R for "violence and language". For twenty bucks it better have more than that.

I won't pay to see it because of my deep-seated antipathy for Matt Damon after Good Will Hunting and that horrible soliloquy he wrote or improvised in Saving Private Ryan.

Based loosely on the case of Amanda Knox. She's spoken out against the movie. Matt Damon plays a young woman's elderly Trump-loving father who goes to France to prove her innocence as she awaits trial for murder. Does he speak French in this? Maybe he plays a Cajun.

I am reminded of Keith Carradine's line from Southern Comfort (1981): "I used to parlez vous a little in high school."

They could have had Matt Damon say that to prepare us for his adventure in France. That and, "I've been reading my daughter's old Nancy Drew books."

Luis Buñuel, a quote

 “I remember being struck by de Sade’s will, in which he asked that his ashes be scattered to the four corners of the earth in the hope that humankind would forget both his writings and his name. I’d like to be able to make that demand; commemorative ceremonies are not only false but dangerous, as are all statues of famous men. Long live forgetfulness, I’ve always said—the only dignity I see is in oblivion.” 

--Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh

Budd Boetticher's DECISION AT SUNDOWN (1957)

Not even Budd Boetticher liked this one. It was like a garbled version of High Noon.

Randolph Scott played a terrible jerk. He arrives in town and the first thing he does is threaten the barber.

Scott crashes the wedding of local bigshot Tate Kimbrough. When the minister asks if anyone knows any reason why the couple shouldn't be bound in holy matrimony, Scott knows a reason. Because he's going to murder the groom. He waves a gun around, flees the church and exchanges gunfire with wedding guests.

Turns out he's mad that Kimbrough slept with his wife three years earlier and he thinks this was somehow to blame for her suicide. His friend (Noah Beery, Jr) tries to tell him that she slept with lots of guys and Randolph Scott socks him.

High Noon's ending always bothered me. Gary Cooper rides away with an untreated gunshot wound. In this one, Kimbrough at least has his arm in a sling.

Budd Boetticher's SEVEN MEN FROM NOW (1956)

I don't know why other low budget westerns were never this good. Fewer than fifteen speaking roles. Like the old Krazy Kat comics, set in a surreal desert landscape.

Randolph Scott plays a sheriff who was voted out of his job. Too proud to work as a mere deputy, his wife had to take a job in a Wells Fargo office. Now he's hunting for the men who killed her during a robbery.

He's joined by Lee Marvin and his partner who are looking for the men, too, but only for the $20,000 in gold they stole. Scott helps a woman and her less masculine husband headed west in a covered wagon.

When Randolph Scott feels bad about having not provided for his wife, the woman (Gail Russell) assures him that she doesn't love her husband any less because of the way he is.

Kind of an interesting twist toward the end. 

I never understood that thing where the hero outdraws the villain. Doesn't seem like a sign of virtue or good law enforcement.

In Violent Saturday, an Amish farmer stabs Lee Marvin in the back with a pitchfork. Should he have squared off with him and pulled a gun really fast instead?

Lawrence Kasdan's BODY HEAT (1981)

Set during a heat wave but reportedly filmed during a cold snap. They had to spray the actors down with sweat as they shivered in the cold.

William Hurt plays a good-looking but incompetent attorney who starts sleeping with Kathleen Turner. They plot to murder her wealthy husband. 

Perhaps an antidote to Gideon's Trumpet. Having a Florida lawyer may not be much of a boon after all. Turner's Columbia law school graduate husband (Richard Crenna) politely says, "That's a good school," when Hurt tells him he went to Florida State University.

Young Ted Danson as Hurt's prosecutor friend. Mickey Rourke as one of his clients.

I didn't mind them killing Turner's venture capitalist husband, but why I was rooting for William Hurt?

Available on The Criterion Channel

Gideon's Trumpet (made-for-TV 1980)

Henry Fonda as Clarence Gideon, an impoverished drifter falsely convicted in 1961 of felony theft and sentenced to five years in prison because Florida would only appoint lawyers for indigent defendants in death penalty cases. He appealed his conviction and it was overturned by the Supreme Court.

With Jose Ferrer, John Housman, Fay Wray, Sam Jaffe, and Dean Jagger among others.

It was a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. It was straightforward, sort of flat. Prison didn't look half bad. Everyone was fine except for one guy. It's hard to imagine the U.S. has ever had any Supreme Court justice who looked or spoke like John Houseman.

It might make a double feature with Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956), another true story with Fonda playing a musician falsely accused of a series of robberies.

Ride Lonesome (1959) Budd Boetticher, director

It looked beautiful, in color, wide screen. The movie didn't treat the Indians as badly as some other westerns. There were two relatively minor gunfights and a couple of modest stand-offs that ended when one guy wimped out. Mostly dialogue scenes. The night scenes were day-for-night which was kind of nice for a change.

Randolf Scott is a bounty hunter taking a young fellow in for murder. Pernell Roberts and James Coburn join him along with Karen Steele as the widow of a stagecoach station master. Lee Van Cleef as the murderer's brother coming to rescue him.

I like it now, but when I was a kid, I was home alone a lot. I'd be playing with my cars with the TV on, often with a western like this on which helped turn me off to the genre.

In the 1980's, they showed the westerns of Budd Boetticher at the University of Oregon. At the time, I was baffled why they were showing what I thought were middling '50's cowboy movies. Seattle critic Sean Axemaker was a student there at the time and wrote his thesis on them. I don't know if he coaxed them into showing the movies or they showed them and he jumped on them for his thesis, but they're now available on the Criterion Channel so I guess I was wrong.

Summer of '42 (1971) versus My Dinner with Andre (1981)

The movie Summer of '42 was just kind of repulsive. Homely teens on vacation in Nantucket do nothing but talk about sex. It shows the advantage kid actors have over adults. Before this, the star, Gary Grimes who played the screenwriter Herman Raucher as a 14-year-old, appeared in one episode of Gunsmoke, one episode of My Three Sons and one episode of The Brady Bunch. Only his character in Gunsmoke had a name. And with that minimal experience, he starred in a major motion picture. 

I first read the Mad Magazine version and later saw the movie on network television. I came across it on streaming video and clicked on it for some reason.

The kids in the movie used diminutive forms of names that didn't have diminutive forms. Oscar was called "Oscy" and Herman was "Hermie".

According to Wikipedia, Oscy and Hermie in real life had been friends since childhood. They went to college together and, if I understood it correctly, were both in the Korean War. Oscy was killed on Hermie's birthday and Hermie never celebrated it again.

Raucher began writing the script as a tribute to his late friend. But he quickly realized he knew nothing really personal about him and that the two of them had never had a meaningful conversation. So the script became autobiographical, about his relationship with a young woman whose husband, by the end of the movie, had been killed in the war.

It could be that Herman and Oscar just didn't have much to talk about. They may not have had any strong feelings about their families or World War Two, being drafted or anything they studied in college.

 

I didn't really have much reaction to Summer of '42, but the Wikipedia entry for it made me contemplate the depth of my own conversations. When I was young, my friends and I talked a lot about ideology. I don't know how much personal information I have on any of them.

It made me think more about it than My Dinner with Andre did. Wallace Shawn and theater director Andre Gregory sit in an expensive New York restaurant. Andre talks and talks and talks about his semi-mystical experiences traveling the world. It's part Razor's Edge, part Auntie Mame. I didn't know if he was a serious mystic or an annoying eccentric. I liked it, but it made me feel better about not traveling the world or getting to eat and talk with wealthy, sophisticated New Yorkers.

Zatoichi's Vengeance, 1966, #13 in the series

Zatoichi is a very nice blind masseur who kills people. Lots of them. The weakness of this movie is that he's so good at it and is pretty much invincible, why hold back?

There was one reason. A blind priest tells him that he's corrupting a boy he's befriended. It's like if Alan Ladd hesitated to kill Jack Palance because he didn't want Brandon de Wilde to think shooting people was good.

It's not an issue today, but children should be taught not to physically cling to unrelated men when they're in the middle of a swordfight.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Why really low budget film didn't interest people

I think I understand it now. I'm embarrassed that it took me until now.

Thirty-five years ago, I talked with a guy at work. We were both dishwashers. He said he was a film major. I asked him what he planned to do and was shocked when he said, "I'm going to go to Hollywood and direct movies." He said it with such conviction that I half believed him.

It was the '80's, before digital video, before even Hi8 video. I had just learned that people were making 16mm features for a few thousand dollars---Jon Jost was in the Guinness Book of World Records for his $2,000 feature. It was something that fascinated me, but not him even though it was probably his only serious hope of ever making a feature film. I thought that, for him, it was all or nothing, Hollywood or bust; if he couldn't be Steven Spielberg, he'd keep washing dishes.

But that thing Eric Rohmer said, "It was a type of cinema hated by even amateur filmmakers. They admire professional-looking films in 35mm with special effects, etc." that made it come clear to me.

We were talking about two different things. It's like if he wanted to write graphic novels and I was enthusing over Gasoline Alley. There may be some overlap, but they weren't on the same continuum. 

And, realistically, ten thousand dollars back then was about $20 thousand now. It was still a vast sum of money for most of us and you'd be throwing it away on something no one would watch even if it came out well.

Things seem to be different now. I talked to a penniless film student who showed me the camcorder he managed to get his hands on. As far as I could tell, he only liked superhero and zombie movies, but he was going to start filming.

Eric Rohmer on French Canadian TV, 1977, on Criterion Channel

 Here it is without subtitles:

There's a 1977 interview with Eric Rohmer on The Criterion Channel, an interview on a French Canadian TV show called Parlons Cinema (Movie Talk). 

Just a few random items from the episode:

They asked Rohmer how he felt about about Gene Hackman's character in the movie Night Moves (also available on the Criterion Channel) saying that watching his movies was like watching paint dry. Rohmer said he hadn't seen the movie. He had heard about it. "Like watching paint dry" isn't an idiom in French but he correctly guessed its meaning and accepted it. Some people find his movies boring. If you're not interested in the conversation, you feel left out.

There was talk about the progress of his early career.

Even back then, in the days of 16mm, before home video or prosumer camcorders, they thought "anybody can make a movie". There are two guys asking questions so I'm combining them here:

Q. It was harder for young filmmakers back then than it is today. Even so, you can draw a parallel between then and now, because cinema is now in a crisis similar to the 1950's, perhaps worse. But it's different. The avant-garde has become the mainstream. Before there was commercial cinema, and "outsider" cinema which no theaters would show.

A. It was scorned.

Q. Now just about anyone can make a film, but they can't get it shown. It might get a three-day run somewhere, but that's all.

A. It was a type of cinema hated by even amateur filmmakers. They admire professional-looking films in 35mm with special effects, etc. But now you can make films in 8mm or 16mm, and there's always some sort of audience. Back then, the only audience for it was the Cine-club du Quartier Latin, and that was it.

Q. Everything changed in the late '50's, when new technology made filmmaking cheaper, leading to the birth of the New Wave.

Later in the interview, Rohmer says:

"One of the paradoxes of cinema is that it has form without content. Cinema's lack of ideas is its deepest flaw. I myself as a filmmaker lack ideas and that's probably why I made films. I'm not an author. I have no ideas. And when I speak with my friends, they often say, 'I don't have any ideas either.' Very often it's the people with the fewest ideas who end up having the most. A story either comes about by chance, or it's the fruit of a thought process that takes a long time to develop.

"Very few films have truly original scripts. Today's scripts aren't very original, though perhaps more than before, but on the other hand, they lack the compelling power of earlier cinema. Scripts used to be adapted from existing stories that were thrilling, interesting, enthralling for audiences. Now scripts are pages from private journals so the audience isn't as interested, even if it's a very refined, intellectual one."

The Diamond Arm (USSR, 1969)

One of the better Soviet comedies. Kind of a typical mainstream 1960's comedy except for the anti-religious elements. It had gags you'd never see in an American movie back then. 

Yuri Nikulin goes on a cruise and becomes embroiled in a smuggling operation.

The trouble for criminals in the USSR was that there was no legitimate way to get rich. If you had a lot of money, it was obvious you were up to no good. They raised this point in The Little Golden Calf, the sequel to The Twelve Chairs, by Ilf and Petrov, and it came up at the end of Gorky Park. They find a way around it in this movie. 

I still hear people claim that the Soviets tried to paint their country as perfect and utterly free of crime, but half the Soviet movies I've seen were crime movies, especially Kidnapping, Caucasian Style.

The DVD I watched had both the dubbed and subtitled version.

The humiliating defeat in Afghanistan

The U.S.-back "government" in Afghanistan is quickly collapsing. Their army is heading for the hills.

From Patrick Cockburn in Counterpunch,  "The Forever War in Afghanistan is Far from Over":

More generally, why did what was presented as a decisive victory by US-backed anti-Taliban forces twenty years ago turn into the present rout?

One answer is that Afghanistan – like Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – is not a country where the word “decisive” should ever be used about any military victory or defeat. Winners and losers do not emerge, because there are too many players, inside and outside the country, who cannot afford to lose, or to see an enemy win.

Simple-minded analogies with Vietnam in 1975 are misleading. The Taliban does not have anything like the military might of the North Vietnamese army. Moreover, Afghanistan is a mosaic of ethnic communities, tribes and regions, which the Taliban will struggle to rule whatever happens to the Kabul government.

The disintegration of the Afghan army and security forces has accelerated the Taliban’s attack, which has often faced little resistance, and has enabled it to make spectacular territorial gains. Such rapid changes of fortune on the battlefield in Afghanistan are traditionally fueled by individuals and communities swiftly changing to the winning side. Families send their young men to fight for both the government and the Taliban as a form of insurance. Swift surrenders by cities and districts avoid retribution, while over-long resistance leads to massacre.

Contrary to popular belief, the Soviets won their war in Afghanistan. The U.S. expected to see the socialist government collapse as soon as the Soviets left, but it didn't happen. The Soviets won by paying the other side to stop fighting. As long as the Soviet government made their payments, the Afghan government remained.

For $2.3 trillion the U.S. couldn't have done the same?

The infrastructure built by the Soviets is still there. The U.S. hasn't done much of anything for the country. 

An Afghan friend who had once worked for United States Agency for International Development (USAID) explained to me some of the mechanics of how corruption was able to flourish. He said that American aid officials in Kabul thought it too dangerous for them personally to visit projects they were financing. Instead, they stayed in their heavily defended offices and relied on photographs and videos to show them the progress of the projects they were paying for.

On occasion, they would send an Afghan employee like my friend to see for himself what was happening on the ground. On a visit to Kandahar to monitor the building of a vegetable-packing plant, he discovered that a local company akin to a film studio would, for a fee, take convincing pictures of work in progress. Using extras and a suitable backdrop, they were able to show employees in a shed busily sorting carrots and potatoes, though no such facility existed.

On another occasion, the Afghan aid official had discovered evidence of a fraud, though this time there had been little attempt to conceal it. After looking in vain for a well-funded but non-existent chicken farm near Jalalabad, he met with its proprietors, who pointed out to him that it was a long road back to Kabul. Interpreting this as a threat to murder him if he exposed them, he kept quiet and resigned from his job soon afterwards.

 

 

Braguino (2017)

 

Fifty-one minute documentary. A Russian family lives in the taiga (south of the tundra, north of the steppe) in eastern Siberia. In the vast expanse of wilderness, hundreds of miles from the nearest town, they moved in right next to another family that had done the same thing. 

 

Two families living right next to each other in primitive conditions who hate each other and want to be alone might make a pretty good western, but not much happens here.

There was a documentary about a similar situation, The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden (2013). There are three small German households on an otherwise uninhabited island in the 1930's. They hate each other and apparently start murdering each other, but there was no way to prove it. 

Nothing that dramatic happens here. We see the patriarch shooting ducks. The children plucking them was surprisingly ghastly. I fast forwarded when they started butchering a bear they killed. And a helicopter lands with some wealthy, belligerent, heavily armed hunters. 

The families do have radios, satellite phones, flashlights and boats with motors on them and they care about their personal appearance for some reason.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless celebrating 61 years

Briefly, from Jeffrey St. Clair on Counterpunch.com:

Jean Seberg in a letter to a friend back in California, while filming Breathless: “I’m in the midst of this French film and it’s a long, absolutely insane experience–no lights, no makeup, no sound! Only one good thing–it’s so un-Hollywood I’ve become completely unselfconscious.”

They said it was the movie's 50th anniversary, but they must have meant 60th and it's really the 61st, isn't it?

And I don't know if this is true, but I'd like it to be:

It’s now pretty clear that Godard didn’t know what he was doing technically when he made Breathless. And didn’t care. And not caring made all of the difference…

This is Not a Test (1962)

The cop was really a jackass. Late at night on a two lane road in the desert, a deputy gets a message. He blocks the road. Barks orders at the drivers he stops. There may be a nuclear attack. He thinks the trailer of a truck will serve as a fallout shelter.

I saw this movie in the middle of the night when I was thirteen or fourteen. I thought the cop was an idiot for smashing all the bottles of liquor. You'd think it might be useful medically after the apocalypse.

The film is public domain. I watched it on Pub-D-Hub although it's available elsewhere including YouTube. You could do a remake, one where they kill the cop so they can die in peace.

72 minutes. 

Freud: The Secret Passion (John Huston, 1962)

Montgomery Clift in the title role. Set early in Freud's career. Psychiatrists back then discovered they could help patients overcome symptoms of PTSD by putting them under hypnosis and having them recount the traumatic events that caused it. In one scene, a young woman (Susannah York) has partial hysterical blindness. Under hypnosis, she relives an incident where she had to identify her father's body. Her vision is instantly restored.

These same techniques among others were used on soldiers suffering "combat fatigue" or PTSD during World War Two. I haven't seen it, but, John Huston made a documentary about this in 1946 when he was still in the Army Signal Corps. The film, Let There Be Light, was suppressed by the government until the 1980's.

Freud was made the same year as The Manchurian Candidate. Both movies had sequences of patients under hypnosis, showing first a distorted version of events, then again showing the identical events as they really appeared. The patient makes the first Freudian slip, confusing "protestant" and "prostitute".

With David McCallum, two years before The Man From U.N.C.L.E., as a patient who unnerves Freud by giving him his first brush with an Oedipus Complex.

I had seen Freud on TV a couple of times decades ago. I was impressed by it and wondered why I hadn't seen it again in so long. It's available now on the Criterion Channel which is featuring the films of John Huston.

Matt Damon possibly less dumb than we thought a minute ago

Well. Okay.

But in a statement to Variety, Damon said that he has never used the word in his “personal life” and does not “use slurs of any kind.” He also affirmed that he understands why the interview “led many to assume the worst.”

“During a recent interview, I recalled a discussion I had with my daughter where I attempted to contextualize for her the progress that has been made – though by no means completed – since I was growing up in Boston and, as a child, heard the word ‘f*g’ used on the street before I knew what it even referred to,” Damon said in the statement. “I explained that that word was used constantly and casually and was even a line of dialogue in a movie of mine as recently as 2003; she in turn expressed incredulity that there could ever have been a time where that word was used unthinkingly. To my admiration and pride, she was extremely articulate about the extent to which that word would have been painful to someone in the LGBTQ+ community regardless of how culturally normalized it was. I not only agreed with her but thrilled at her passion, values and desire for social justice.

“I have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening. I do not use slurs of any kind,” Damon continued. “I have learned that eradicating prejudice requires active movement toward justice rather than finding passive comfort in imagining myself ‘one of the good guys’. And given that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community is still not uncommon, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst. To be as clear as I can be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”

 

I guess if you believe someone's dumb enough to tell an interviewer that he went around calling people that, you'd also have to believe he was dumb enough to tell an innocuous anecdote so badly that he gave everyone the wrong impression.

 

If Damon didn't keep saying stupid things, people might have been slower to jump on this. They might at least have been a little surprised. 

And finally this from indiwire:

Damon emphatically stresses his support for the LGBTQ community, but he does a disservice to himself (and those he aims to appease) by denying ever using the word. In his carefully worded statement, he seems to be implying that since he has never “called anyone” the slur in his “personal life,” he is above reproach. He then directly denies using slurs of any kind, despite having only just admitted to saying it in the August 1 Times interview.

(He also says it in this GQ interview from 2007, while discussing what he and Affleck did with the “Good Will Hunting” money. “We knew it would just be so gay to get the same car. And our friends were making fun of us. Like, ‘You fags, what are you doing,” Damon said.)

 

50-year-old Harvard boy Matt Damon even dumber than we thought

I'm rather astonished. I knew Matt Damon was a jackass. Turns out that, up until a few months ago, he's been in the habit of referring to gay men as "fags" or "faggots", I'm not sure which because he now rather prissily calls it "the f-slur". His daughter had to tell him to knock it off. He argued with her that it was funny because he said it a movie.

It's one thing after another with him. 

As a member of the press, I like when celebrities talk to the press, but it's always illuminating to hear the stories that folks like Liam Neeson or Matt Damon think are humanizing and charming, but actually reveal insulation and isolation (among other unsavory stuff) instead.

--Daniel Feinberg on Twitter

The Truth about Romance (UK, 2013)

It's a bad, bad sign when the main character in a movie made by a film student says that Star Wars is his favorite movie.

Reportedly made for less than $300, which is odd since the filmmaker seemed to be from a wealthy family. I assume these scenes were filmed in his parents' home, but it was about characters in their 20's who all lived in expensive new houses and they made it clear that they didn't live with their parents. 

[Okay, I was wrong. According to the guy's blog, the house belonged to the parents of the girlfriend of an actor. They planned to use a more modest residence but that fell through. The filmmaker was out of film school and living hand to mouth. Even if he weren't, couldn't I just be happy for him?]

After five years, an English guy is finally going to tell his female friend his repressed English feelings for her. The girl drops by his mansion and tells him she's heading for a new job in Paris.

Depressed, he instantly strikes up a relationship with a young woman on a park bench.

They hang around. Talk a lot. They go for a walk in the country and later steal someone's boat. It made the English countryside look pretty good.

It's amazing what you can do for three hundred dollars. 

I would have forgiven anything if the guy had lived in a "bedsit".

Free on Pub-D-Hub.