Nothing much

Listened to a little news about the upheaval in the movie industry caused by COVID-19. Everything is being delayed. It was okay with me. I don't want to see a James Bond movie or anything based on a comic book. I don't know if this will be a boon to cinema, but it couldn't make it much worse.

When Woody Allen's Rainy Day in New York became the top grossing movie in the world, he quipped that all it took was a deadly global pandemic to put him on top.

I watched a little of a low budget western. Soldiers go out somewhere and are surrounded by Indians.

I watched only the first several minutes. It looked very well-made with what they said were authentic uniforms. It was filmed on a western set like the one where they were filming Rust. But I looked it up on IMDb, read the user comments, and there was nothing but seething hatred against it. Not because they made Indians the villains, but because it wasn't up to Steven Spielberg standards.

One person was outraged that there were any positive reviews at all and seriously suggested that IMDb remove them because they were obviously wrong. 

I might have felt the same way if I had watched another twenty minutes. One person said that people made the movie just to make a movie. Which could have been true, but even if it were, there have been perfectly good movies made just for the sake of making a movie. How many movies did Roger Corman make because he had a few days before he had to tear down a set? Didn't Pudovkin make Storm Over Asia because he happened to be in Mongolia or someplace that looked like Mongolia?

I bring this up because I started this post with nothing to say. I just haven't posted anything in a few days and thought I'd better write something. I posted for the sake of posting.

I haven't watched anything I want to admit to. On Amazon, they had these really cheap DVDs of sadly unerotic 1950's "pornography". I'm always amused at the extreme low end of commercial cinema, so I ordered one. They're from a company that puts out old public domain B movies.

A series of short films. I thought they might have sort of a storyline, that the "filmmakers" might have seen them as a stepping stone to slightly more lavish productions,  but I was disappointed. 

It was six bucks with free shipping. If I saw it in a store I would have bought it on impulse, although, there, you could pay cash and wouldn't have the purchase etched indelibly onto your permanent record.

 

Now that I think about it, in those days, wasn't pornography all produced by the Mafia? There was some nonsense that it was all being produced by Communists--- some congressman claimed that photographers, film crews and naked ladies converged on a town in Poland to produce all the dirty pictures and movies that were destroying the West. But if the Soviets produced it, it would have been so much better. The movies would have been well-lit and had a little story.

No, this was the work of the Mafia. The dirty, stinking Mafia.

Anyone could make a dirty movie, obviously, but the Mafia would simply steal it. This continued until someone in the FBI realized that enforcing copyright would be an easy way to go after organized crime.