Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945)

Dana Andrews as an oddly well-dressed drifter who finds himself in a small town. He marries a wealthy girl for her money so he can dump her, take half her money and marry the girl he's really after. A degenerate in love. Another movie made during World War Two with no mention of World War Two. It might have ruined it if it did. Is COVID-19 a thing in movies and TV shows now?

Alice Faye and Linda Darnell. With John Carradine as an itinerate spiritualist and Percy Kilbride, cinema's Pa Kettle, as Pop.

Maybe film students should be like Sam Bankman-Fried

With all that money, he could have done anything.

They make it sound so easy. I read an article somewhere saying that other youthful "Effective Altruism" believers have gone into fields where they could make as much money as possible.

I have two brothers who are jazz musicians. Somewhere, one of their friends, noting some of their other friends, said that a spouse with a lucrative career was the musician's best bet.
 

Maybe going into a field where you can embezzle billions before you're 30 would be the best way to fund your absurdly expensive filmmaking hobby.

How many people become movie directors by studying to be movie directors? Most of them seem to go into it by way of some other career. Actors, musicians, stuntmen. I know of one animal wrangler. Bigfoot researcher, comedian, novelist, screenwriter. I heard of a law student in the South who bought an old movie theater in a small town for almost nothing, then made a movie so he'd have something to show. There was a school principal who made educational films. Evangelicals. Anti-Communists. 911 truthers. Guy who thought Michael Jackson was innocent. Newspaper columnist. 

What's the best field to go into if you want to parlay it into movie directing?

Something someone else wrote about Harry and Meghan which I haven't seen

I read this and, for a minute, I really wanted to see it:

Netflix’s Harry and Meghan has been billed as a documentary, but it is clear that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have never watched that form of the genre.  Hardly surprising: Prince Harry is unworldly and semi-literate and Meghan can hardly count herself as a cerebral giant. Indulgent, narcissistic and manipulative, the Prince and his Hollywood companion have done a spectacular job of undermining any reserves of sympathy they might have had in their freezing out from the Windsor universe.

Much has and will be made of the various personal details the Netflix production is promoting.  The dominant theme is blame and blamelessness, enriched by a layering of score-settling.  Unaware by the implications of her own conduct, Meghan herself observes that, “Most people need to find someone to blame.”

The couple are, naturally, clean, washed, pristine; the laundry of everybody else, from the media to the ghastly relatives, is not.  “I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the (Daily) Mail did.  I watched the whole thing,” states a forlorn Harry.

Read the whole thing here.

After watching some of the former rich kids in the 7 Up series and reading attacks on Prince Charles, I realized that I approved of self-pity in the British upper crust. The poor devils get no sympathy from anyone else.

But this thing just sounds like Reality TV, about rich people who don't deserve to be rich.

War of the Gargantuas (1966)

Like a more serious Godzilla movie because much of it took place at night. And it was better. Less cartoonish, although it was pretty much the same thing. Two giant ugly ape men fight in a Japanese city. With Russ Tamblyn as an expat scientist. Ikio Sawamura, the town officer from Yojimbo, appears briefly.

Post Avatar Depression

Avatar never interested me, but now I see articles about something called Post Avatar Depression Syndrome. A shocking number of people who see the movie become despondent.

“Ever since I went to see Avatar I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them,” one wrote. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in Avatar.”

I almost want to watch the movie just to see if I'm made of tougher stuff than these Avatar fans, but I checked Roku. The movie has brought in nearly $3 billion but they're so greedy they still won't let you see it for free. 

I don't know if there've been any Avatar-related suicides. People started disappearing off cruise ships after Titantic, presumably while trying to climb out on the prow so they could yell that they were king of the world. How many people have James Cameron movies killed?

Sam Bankman-Fried arrested

His parents had been with him for a month in the Bahamas. There are some articles online saying that his parents will be financially ruined paying his legal fees. They're supposedly a progressive family, but their two sons have devoted their lives to grubbing for money. The other one is a stockbroker. And the parents are happy with this.

The Bankman-Fried clan's belief in "Effective Altruism" led to their self-destruction. It's an excuse for being a grotesquely rich, completely unproductive parasite. This is what admiration for George Soros has wrought. That guy is a currency trader. What a humanitarian.

Professors Bankman and Fried correctly accepted the Marxist critique of capitalist society but were too bourgeois to accept the Marxist solution of working class political action. "Effective Altruism" is the opposite of that, the belief that only the super-rich are qualified to mold society. 

If Bankman and Fried were Communists, they would be financially unthreatened. Their sons would be decent people. Communists in capitalist countries are like Calvinists. They live modestly. Because of that they have extra money which they tend to put into rental property which isn't a problem in Marxism. 

Maybe this will be a good thing for them. They've announced their retirement. Once they squander their wealth trying to keep their son out of prison, they can live on Social Security. Move into a camper and do some traveling before settling down somewhere, maybe moving in with their other son if he would have them, if he's not too bitter after years of being the less successful brother even though he's the  good one who stayed out of prison.

Sam gave them a $16 million Bahamian vacation home. How could the other one ever compete with that?

Taylor Swift to direct

Searchlight Pictures announced that Taylor Swift will direct a movie based on her own script. 

“Taylor is a once in a generation artist and storyteller. It is a genuine joy and privilege to collaborate with her as she embarks on this exciting and new creative journey.”

They won't say, but it will probably be about a guy she dated briefly and now hates.

Serge Gainsbourg directed movies, some deeply disturbing. John Lennon directed some music videos. Neil Young, Frank Zappa---they were directors. Barbra Streisand, of course. Show business is show business, apparently. In this state, we had an animal wrangler turn movie director.

Anything Else (Woody Allen, 2003)

Woody Allen plays a dangerously neurotic Christ figure. Danny De Vito is healed after coming in contact with him and Allen sacrifices himself in a way so that Jason Biggs can achieve happiness and grow as a human being. 

Jason Biggs as a struggling young comedy writer who has befriended sixtyish struggling comedy writer Woody Allen. Biggs is shacked with his bad girlfriend (Christina Ricci) whose mother (Stockard Channing) moves in with them.

This and Hannah and Her Sisters are the only two Woody Allen movies I've seen which involve the purchase of a rifle, but he's made so many he may have done this in others I haven't seen.

It was all dialogue. Quentin Tarantino said it was one of his 20 favorite movies made since 1992. I watched it because critics tended not to like it and it failed at the box office. Leonard Maltin rated it a "BOMB". I would tend to agree to Tarantino, though. I thought it was one of Allen's more enjoyable movies. 

Sam Bankman-Fried's mother's "flash fiction"

Her obviously guilty "son".

Barbara Fried, the Stanford law professor mother of disgraced crypto-currency ex-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, was the author of "flash fiction", very short fiction. It's easy to write and easy to read, at least in theory. 

I don't know if her stories offer insight into what's wrong with her horrible son. In one, she fantasizes about being the mother of a dead son. Another is about a mother and child who turn out not to be related, another about an elderly mother with no memory of ever having a child. There's a little bit of a pattern there.

Here's a link to one of Fried's award-winning stories:

https://losangelesreview.org/henry-barbara-fried/ 

At the end of the story is information about the author:

Barbara Fried’s short stories have appeared, among other places, in Bellevue Literary Review, Subtropics, Guernica, and Word Riot. Her story “The Half-Life of Nat Glickstein” was chosen as a Distinguished Story of 2013 by the editors of Best American Short Stories. Other of her stories have received recognition, including finalist in the Bellevue Literary Review’s 2013 Fiction Contest, top 25 in Glimmertrain’s 2014 Very Short Fiction contest, long list in Fish’s 2014-15 Short Story Contest, and semi-finalist in New Millennium’s 2011 Fiction contest.

In her day job, she is a law professor at Stanford University, in which capacity she has written widely on political and moral theory for academic and general audiences.

Here's another:

https://law.stanford.edu/index.php?webauth-document=publication/441932/doc/slspublic/Really%20by%20Barbara%20Fried%20Word%20Riot.pdf

And another:

https://walleahpress.com.au/communion1-Barbara_Fried.html

Here's a page with some links to her other stories and poems:

https://www.bhfried.com/page2

Writing is a popular pastime in prison, something certain members of the Bankman-Fried clan might keep in mind. Sam is walking around free in the Bahamas and says he's down to his last hundred thousand dollars, like we're supposed to feel sorry for him. More than enough to go on the lam. Are there still back alley plastic surgeons?

Cold Turkey (1971) directed by Norman Lear

Norman Lear said that he considered episodes of his TV shows to be one act plays. This movie, made before his first TV series, was the opposite of that. There were short dialogue scenes, but it was pretty much a big montage of a town where everyone agrees to stop smoking for one month to win $25 million from a cigarette company.

P.R. guy Bob Newhart convinces an extremely old cigarette company owner that he would be like Alfred Nobel, remembered for the Nobel Peace Prize which never interfered in his munitions business. It'd be impossible for an entire town to stop smoking anyway.

Dick Van Dyke as the minister in what seems to be the only church in a declining town of four thousand people who leads them to stop smoking so they can win the money. He played a nice guy, but not that nice. 

People smoked way more back then. I was always slightly shocked as a kid---you'd occasionally walk past the Teachers Lounge, the door would open and they'd all be in there with cigarettes dangling from their lips. One or two would eat lunch in the cafeteria alone, surrounded by students, because the Teachers Lunchroom was so thick with smoke. Back then, if you had a one pack a day habit, you were a light smoker.

Full of actors who went on to appear in Normal Lear's shows. Jean Stapleton and Vincent Gardenia from All in the Family, Graham Jarvis from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Paul Benedict from The Jeffersons. With Bernard Hughes, Tom Poston, and Judith Lowery as an elderly foul-mouthed anti-Communist.

With Bob and Ray in multiple roles as reporters and interviewers.   

I haven't seen this since the '70's when they'd show it on network TV.

Music by Randy Newman. Robert Downey Sr was a second unit director.

 

The Third Man (1949)

I heard an interview a few years ago with now-former critic A.S. Hamrah promoting The Earth Dies Streaming, a collection of his reviews. He talked about a contemporary review of The Third Man by Manny Farber in The Nation magazine, and, I don't know, I guess this was some sort of revelation to him, reading a review written before the movie attained its current status. Farber was more critical than people writing about it today would be.

I watched the movie again on the Criterion Channel. It was brilliant. I don't care what this Manny Farber person thought. Who the hell was Manny Farber?

I didn't like the anti-Communism. They were in Vienna, a hopelessly corrupt city full of murderous "former" Nazis, and we were supposed to worry that Valli might have to live in Czechoslovakia. She would have been better off in a socialist country. In Vienna, she dated a monster who horribly victimized a large number of children for profit. She knew what he did and still thought he was dreamy.

Gun Girls (1957)

Not as good as you'd expect. I found it weird that it was based on a novel. It didn't seem like something that needed a literary source.

About juvenile delinquents of indeterminate age. They commit a number of violent robberies. In an opening scene, we see one hit a man over the head after another girl lured him into an alleyway. They sell stolen property to a fence (Timothy Farrell) and buy a couple of guns from him. Most of the action takes place in Timothy Farrell's one room apartment.

“I understand now! With a gun, you’re somebody.”

In one scene, the two girls gather their stolen loot.

“Remember the sucker we conked in the alley that night?”

“I’ll never forget it. You know, I was sure scared. It was the first time I ever lured a man in an alley.”

“I’m hip. But there’s a first time for everything, honey.”

One of them says, “Come on. Let’s change clothing and get out of here.”

Starring Eve Brent who went on to have a pretty good career as a supporting actor, with Timothy Farrell,  former silent film actor Harry Keatan and Barbara Weeks, all of whom appeared in movies that were directed and/or written by Ed Wood. One of Brent's last roles was in an episode of Community.

The film wasn't amusing. Sort of interesting how little you could do in a movie back then and still have it be commercially viable.

A little creativity wouldn't have cost anything. There was a Japanese juvenile delinquency movie where two girls from rival gangs fight at night in the dark, each with a flashlight in one hand and a switchblade in the other.  In another, Japanese high school girls attempt to murder a classmate by having her blood slowly drip into a vat used in science class. They learned in health class how much blood you have to lose for it to kill you, so they tell the poor girl that when it gets to a certain level she'll die. 

But, for Gun Girls, I guess they needed to at least pretend to have some seriousness of purpose. It starts with a Dragnet-like narration and has a scene where a girl's parole officer berates her parents for the lousy job they've done.

67 minutes. Free on Tubi.

Thanksgiving, 2022

Not much to report.

At dinner, we briefly discussed a brush my brother once had with Chill Wills. I brought up Wills' appearance in Sam Peckinpah's first movie. Turned out one of the guys there, an old friend of my brother-in-law, once lived near a large mural of Strother Martin.

Bones and All doesn't do well

"The year's sexiest cannibal love story." --Variety

From Roger Friedman at Showbiz 411:

“Bones and All” from A24 and director Luca Guadagnino and starring Timothee Chalamet is a huge flop. It made $3.7 [million] over a five day holiday period.

... It’s not like they didn’t have fair warning. Another cannibalism movie, “Fresh,” was closed this spring after getting an F rating from diners.

The public just isn't ready for pro-cannibal cinema. At least the AMERICAN public isn't. I don't know what it tells you that it got a ten minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

I watched this thing for the first time in over forty years. Even after all that time, like other Spielberg movies, it didn't stand up to repeat viewing.

When I was fourteen, I saw it as an attempt by Spielberg to get in on the Star Wars craze.

I don't know how widespread belief in UFOs was back then. When I was about ten, I bought a UFO magazine and was astonished that adults believed in that stuff. I must have been kind of a dumb kid because whenever my fifth grade class got a student teacher, the poor girl was given the task of trying to teach me math. One of them convinced me to start crossing my sevens like a German and discussed her belief in "ancient astronauts". 

I went to an alternative school in sixth grade. One teacher taught nothing but paranormal crap. He brought his books about bigfoot, ghosts and flying saucers and would simply read them to the class. Some of it seemed stupid to me, but I assumed it must have made some kind of sense.

In junior high, other kids were annoyed when teachers would get off the subject and start talking about space aliens, but I found it interesting.

An otherwise intelligent teacher started talking about Easter Island. Aliens obviously carved the statues with lasers, but how did they move them? A couple of kids guessed they used cranes or trucks. The teacher got impatient. They wouldn't need that stuff. They would just use an anti-gravity ray.

So. Close Encounters. They had posters explaining that "the third kind" meant actually meeting the aliens. It fed the UFO craze. Why, even Jimmy Carter once reported a UFO.

The plot was a little thin and it was two hours and fifteen minutes long. Much of it was a horror movie. The aliens had this kind of semi-religious significance but thought nothing of abducting a small child. In one scene, the four-year-old stands in the middle of a road at night on a blind curve. A family of bumpkins is right there with their truck and they do nothing to get him onto the shoulder. That may be why the aliens decided to intervene. Later, a crowd gathers in the same spot walking in the road at night without a thought.

It's been pointed out that the "scientists" in this are all white men, which, in real life, wouldn't say much for white men that they're the only ones who fall for this stuff. Spielberg's movies have always been that way---The Color Purple was an outlier. It's also been pointed out that those New Hollywood guys---Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Bogdanovich, et al---were terrible sexists. They regarded their wives as helpmeets, which might explain something about Richard Dreyfus' character's abusive marriage to Teri Garr. 

Originally, Spielberg planned on using music from Pinocchio, "When You Wish Upon a Star", at the end, but apparently thought better of it.

It never made sense to me how "music" and flashing lights was supposed to communicate anything.

I don't like Spielberg. I've avoided his movies for years, but I'll watch one now and then. I always expect to grudgingly enjoy them but I'm disappointed every time.

With Francois Truffaut and Bob Balaban as his French interpreter. Balaban's cousin, Burt Balaban, made Stranger from Venus in 1954. Richard Dreyfus's nephew plays one of his sons. 

Melinda Dillon as a mother who doesn't keep much of an eye on her pre-schooler. Even at the end when she gets him back from the aliens, she ignores him and takes pictures of the UFO. She rushes to get a better angle and glances back only once to see if  he's still running after her. Stuff like this bothers me more in Spielberg movies where everything is so carefully contrived.

If I were in the middle of Wyoming for the big meeting with the space aliens, I wouldn't wear a tie. I think I'd dress for comfort and I'd want to be ready to flee into the desert if it turned into a Mars Attacks thing. Maybe keep a motorcycle stashed somewhere. And learn to ride a motorcycle.

A Beverly Hillbillies fact

Jethro was the only one to drive the truck because Max Baer, Jr, was the only one strong enough to steer or stop it. The poor guy hated it. There was no power steering or power brakes. I've heard actors complain about having to drive antique cars. They might look cute, but they were unreliable, hard to drive and were death traps even though they were slow. 

There was a documentary on the history of automotive safety. In the 1960's, antique cars were plentiful enough that did crash tests with them. They showed one with an old Dodge. You know those silent comedies where someone wrecks and the car completely falls apart leaving the driver standing in the street surrounded by wreckage holding the steering wheel? That's about how it looked, except the crash test dummy bounced off the steering column and tumbled out of the car. A 20 mile per hour crash was a death sentence.  

And I'll mention one other thing. When watching documentaries like that, so many people feel the need to sit with their eyes glued to the TV. When they're about to show something horrible, consider averting your eyes. One big advantage of living in an advanced country in the 21st century is that you don't have to see horrible injuries and death, but then they just show it to you on TV anyway. 

There was a time when I felt an obligation to watch out of sympathy for the people, but I wasn't doing them any good.

Anna Sorokin, BBC radio docudrama

Sorry. I listened to 2.5 hours of a BBC docudrama about Anna Sorokin, the poor Russian girl whose family had moved to Germany. She wanted to work in fashion and became an intern somewhere then came to the United States.

I was on Sorokin's side when this was reported years ago. She has some legal obligation to tell people her father is a hard-working truck driver and not a wealthy parasite? She has to accurately tell people how much money she has in the bank? She has a legal obligation to assume that when rich people do something nice for her, they're doing it only because they think she's rich, too?

She also stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in services, staying in expensive hotels, throwing parties and never paying for them. And there was the fake loan application, the check kiting and her inviting a woman to go with her on an all expense paid trip to Morocco; they stayed at a hotel charging $16,000 a night. Sorokin had no money, pretended there was some problem with her credit card and convinced her "friend" to put $60,000 in charges she couldn't pay on her American Express card.

A guy on that trip said she was an incredibly boring traveling companion.

It was interesting the first hour or two, but it got dreary, perhaps because I was binge-listening. It included interviews with the miserable souls who survived this ordeal as well as dramatized scenes.

The poor girl is out of prison now, by the way. They're making a Netflix movie about her. She should go back to Germany or Russia so she can write a book about it without the Son of Sam laws robbing her of her profits.  

https://archive.org/details/fake-heiress-BBCr4

Sam Bankman-Fried's parents

I caught the tail end of some BBC news thing about FTX. I thought about Sam Bankman-Fried's parents, probably perfectly nice people shamed by their horrible son whose treachery made a mockery of every one of their deeply held ideals. An article in a San Francisco paper discussed their son's privileged upbringing. He attended a private school that now charges over $56,000 a year tuition.

Now it turns out their jackass son bought them a $16 million vacation home in the Bahamas, part of the $300 million worth of homes and vacation properties the company bought for "senior staff".

According to Reuters:

The documents for another home with beach access in Old Fort Bay - a gated community that was once home to a British colonial fort built in the 1700s to protect against pirates - show Bankman-Fried's parents, Stanford University law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, as signatories. The property, one of the documents dated June 15 said, is for use as a "vacation home."

When asked by Reuters why the couple decided to buy a vacation home in the Bahamas and how it was paid for - whether in cash, with a mortgage or by a third party such as FTX - a spokesman for the professors said only that Bankman and Fried had been trying to return the property to FTX.

"Since before the bankruptcy proceedings, Bankman and Fried have been seeking to return the deed to the company and are awaiting further instructions," the spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.

When asked by Reuters why the couple decided to buy a vacation home in the Bahamas and how it was paid for - whether in cash, with a mortgage or by a third party such as FTX - a spokesman for the professors said only that Bankman and Fried had been trying to return the property to FTX.

Read more at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/sam-bankman-frieds-ftx-senior-staff-parents-bought-bahamas-property-worth-300-million/articleshow/95699836.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

They paid $56,000 a year tuition. They must have felt entitled to something in return. Their son wanted to give them a big giant present. They had to accept it. How were they supposed to know?

Poor devils. Now saddled with millions of dollars in real estate they never asked for. 

Good luck to them.

When asked by Reuters why the couple decided to buy a vacation home in the Bahamas and how it was paid for - whether in cash, with a mortgage or by a third party such as FTX - a spokesman for the professors said only that Bankman and Fried had been trying to return the property to FTX.

Read more at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/sam-bankman-frieds-ftx-senior-staff-parents-bought-bahamas-property-worth-300-million/articleshow/95699836.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

When asked by Reuters why the couple decided to buy a vacation home in the Bahamas and how it was paid for - whether in cash, with a mortgage or by a third party such as FTX - a spokesman for the professors said only that Bankman and Fried had been trying to return the property to FTX.

Read more at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/sam-bankman-frieds-ftx-senior-staff-parents-bought-bahamas-property-worth-300-million/articleshow/95699836.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cpps

The Laughing Policeman

I had read and heard several things over the last several months about film being more form than content. There was Paul Schrader's book on what he called "the transcendental style" in film, and the commentary on the Criterion DVD of Bresson's Pickpocket which noted that the storyline was fairly ordinary. David O. Selznick wanted to do a remake of The Bicycle Thieves and have Gary Cooper star, which seemed absurd, like he missed the whole point of the movie, but the difference between the original and a technicolor Hollywood remake would have been entirely stylistic. The story would presumably have been identical except for him going to his Communist Party cell for help. There was Eric Rohmer's comment in an interview that the grim secret of film is that it's form without content, although I'm not sure exactly how he meant that.

I don't know why this bothers me.

Now I've been listening to radio shows, most from the '30s, '40s or '50s. I was surprised to find there were still radio dramas in the '60s and '70s. In England, it seems that they're still producing them for BBC radio. Maybe it's because the British have to pay a large tax for owning a television. They have to do SOMETHING for the growing numbers who can't pay.

Radio is the opposite of film. It's all content and no form. It's all verbal. 

Some things bother me. Like any episode where someone pulls a gun. Crime shows and westerns were popular so there was a lot of that. There's no way to make this clear on radio without someone saying, "Where did you get that gun!" or "That's right. It's a gun!"

They should have worked on ways to make it sound less direct.

"Didn't Nancy Reagan have a gun like that? Those are for ladies. Do you carry it in your purse?"

Maybe have all the violence take place off-stage:

"I shot him in the leg. I didn't think it'd be a big deal, but there was way more blood than I thought and it killed him. I won't do that again!"

I listened to a 2014 British radio production of The Laughing Policeman, based on a Swedish detective novel from the late 1960s. I had never seen it, but Hollywood made a version of it in the early '70s set in San Francisco starring Walter Matthau.    

Someone with a submachine gun had killed everyone on a city bus late one night. One was a young police detective who had apparently been investigating an old murder case on his own without anyone's knowledge.

A police procedural. There were a few specifically Swedish or European things. The murder weapon was an old Finnish submachine gun, for example.

Radio dramas are faster-moving than films. It was 57 minutes.

Available here.

Sam Bankman-Fried, briefly

Something someone else said about Bankman-Fried. From Jeffrey St. Clair at counterpunch.com.

+ Here’s that paragon of “effective altruism” (ie., only I am enlightened enough to know how to best spend money, therefore I’m justified in accumulating as much as possible, through whatever means I deem necessary) Sam Bankman-Fried on regulation of the financial industry: “Fuck regulators. They make everything worse. They don’t protect consumers at all.”

+ According to bankruptcy filings, more than a million people and businesses lost money in the collapse of FTX. At least a billion dollars in client funds has been reported as “missing.”

+ Of course, there is some justice in the world. Among the biggest losers in the crash of FTX are: Temasek ($320 million), Paradigm ($315 million), SoftBank ($100 million), Sequoia Capital ($350 million), Tom Brady ($45 million) and Anthony Scaramucci!

+ Celebrity promoters of crypto: Tom Brady, Steph Curry, Larry David, Mila Kunis, Jimmy Fallon and Matt Damon.

+ What are we gonna deregulate today, Bro?

I don't know why I feel disappointed in Larry David. I've had a general dislike for Matt Damon since Good Will Hunting. Have no feelings about the others. Who's Tom Brady?

It makes me feel so much better about missing out on this crypto currency fad.  Makes me think of the Fyre Festival more than it does of Bernie Madoff.

Last Timothee Chalamet thing unless he does something

Say! He IS sexy!

I hope this cannibal fad doesn't catch on. Remember all the kids who wanted to be or thought they were vampires? Now there's a pro-Jeffrey Dahmer Netflix series and Timothee Chalamet is starring in what Variety calls "the year's sexiest cannibal love story."

eBay had the good taste to ban the sale of Jeffrey Dahmer Halloween costumes and gay bars banned people dressed as him for the holiday.

I can't remember if it was in Trivial Pursuit or a similar game, but there was a question about trichinosis. You can get it from eating undercooked pork, but what OTHER animal can you get it by eating? The answer was humans. If you ever become a cannibal, be sure to cook human flesh thoroughly, you monster.

If what I read is correct, Timothee Chalamet eats uncooked human in his movie which I guess is just as well.

Chalamet's movie is based on a young adult novel. I don't understand how he has a teen following. Did young people really flock to Rainy Day in New York or Call Me By Your Name? How have they even heard of him?

Timothee Chalamet somewhere

I saw a clip on the Variety website (scroll down a little---you'll see it) of Timothee Chalamet waving slightly to a crowd at a film festival. He was there to promote his teen cannibal movie. Half the people in the crowd were holding up cell phones to record the moment. Why do people do this? The world is already awash with video of Timothee Chalamet.

One time, Bill Clinton came to town and my mother and sister wanted to see him. They wanted me to bring a camera to get his picture. I told them there were millions of pictures of him freely available to them. But they insisted. I brought an Argus C-3, an early 35mm camera first produced in 1939. I did get a picture of him but there was a big crowd and all you could see was his hair. The thought flashed in my head, "I can't get a clear shot!" but I didn't blurt that out.

But they were excited. "That's his hair!"

Unmade movies, BBC radio

There were eight of these produced for BBC radio, 90 minute radio dramas based on unproduced movie scripts.

There's a script intended as a follow-up to North by Northwest, a couple of scripts by Harold Pinter, an early version of On the Waterfront written by Arthur Miller before his split with Elia Kazan. There's Orson Welles' Heart of Darkness. Also a Dracula movie Hammer was considering and a couple of more.

Not the same as film, but it's all we're going to get.

Listen to or download them here.

Gallagher, RIP

The comedian Leo Gallagher has died at age 76. He's said in interviews that he had stints in his heart and could go at any time.

The first I saw him was on a game show called Make Me Laugh where comedians would try to make contestants laugh and it seems strange to say now, but Gallagher was the best one. He was huge in his day. A prop comic. Had several specials on Showtime. His thing was smashing food with a sledge hammer. I don't know if that became a millstone around his neck but he couldn't escape it.

He walked out of an interview with Marc Maron and I watched a video of him being kicked off a radio show somewhere. He turned crabby as he got older. Like some comedians, he was never funny in interviews.

Gallagher made a fortune on tour, but Maron thought that was what hurt is career, that touring was a dead end. It was one reason he didn't end up with a sit-com or a talk show.

Fellow prop comic Joel Hodgeson from Mystery Science Theater once caught Gallagher backstage rummaging through his props. I don't remember their exchange but he didn't like him after that.

There are advantages and disadvantages to being easily imitated. 

Reportedly, Gallagher's agent started representing Carrot Top as well. Gallagher thought he was being edged out by the new prop comic, so he got his brother, Ron Gallagher, to perform his act as Gallagher Two or Gallagher Too. His brother looked and sounded just like him apparently and Gallagher thought that two of him could overwhelm the competition. Eventually, Leo Gallagher wanted Ron to stop performing his act, but Ron kept doing it, so Gallagher sued him which resulted in his (Leo Gallagher's) alienation from his family. I don't know why this happened. Maybe his brother had given up some other career to help him compete with Carrot Top and if he didn't continue to perform, he'd be left without an income. No telling who the bad guy is here.

Paul Haggis loses

 

The jury decided for the plaintiff in the rape lawsuit against Paul Haggis.

The jury awarded the plaintiff $7.5 million in compensation and recommended punitive damages which will be decided on Monday. 

Haggis's attorney admitted that there was no evidence that his victim had any ties to Scientology, but they kept trying to use that anyway, claiming it was all retaliation for his leaving the "church" and criticizing it. What was he doing in that "religion" in the first place? He's a monster.

Bigfoot (1970)

I never rented it, but I used to see the box for it in a local video store.

It's tagline was "BREEDS WITH ANYTHING." It was rated GP---what we now know as PG. There's no breeding in this thing. It was in color, by the way.

Joi Lansing is captured by Bigfoot after her small airplane crashes in the wilderness. (She was the murdered girlfriend in Touch of Evil, the one who says, "...I've got this ticking sound in my head!")

There's a motorcycle gang. They ride matching Hondas and wear slacks and windbreakers instead of leather jackets. One of their biker chicks is abducted as well. When the biker calls for help, the sheriff laughs it off. He gets LOTS of calls about Bigfoot and thinks this is proof they're fake.

It had a number of declining older stars. John Carradine plays a traveling salesman who hopes to capture a Bigfoot for profit. With silent film and B movie cowboy Ken Maynard, Sigourney Weaver's uncle, Doodles Weaver, who hit it big on Spike Jones' radio show, and James Craig whose career took off in the '40's, I suppose because he was 4F and stayed out of the war. 

A lot of it filmed on indoor sets. It had one very tall Bigfoot and a few that weren't much taller than Joi Lansing.

Wasn't lurid or amusing. I was right to skip it in the video store, but it's free on Tubi. To find it there,  search for "big foot". They have it as two words.  

Terry Gross vs Stephen Fry

I used to listen to Fresh Air with Terry Gross on public radio. I quit and I don't care for her anymore for various reasons. She has biases and makes assumptions that make her sound stupid at times, at least to me, and I'm not interested in pop music. But there are these questions she asks---here's an example from an article on "The Middle Mind" by Curtis White:

The critical moment in the interview came when she asked him (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “What was it like when you were in that car accident and your sister was driving and she died but you didn’t?” Was she leading up to a telling psychological reading of the work in question? No. She wanted to know and I suspect her audience wanted to know what it was like to be in an auto accident in which his sister died! That’s it. Do we learn something about writing, or the arts, or culture? Do we learn anything? No, we learn that he was traumatized by the event.

This came to mind while reading something on a BBC website. They ask a number of movie directors the same series of questions, one of which is "What's the dumbest question you've ever been asked?" Because the question is asked in an interview, they think of questions from interviewers, not idiotic questions friends, family or co-workers have asked over the course of a lifetime.

Here was Stephen Fry's answer:

...But there is a classic journalist question, which they should be trained never to ask and that is: "What's it like..." So you get: "What's it like working with John Travolta?" To which there's no real answer. You can be very literal and say: "It's like riding a cloud in a pair of cinnamon-coloured pyjamas, upside down on a Wednesday. That's what it's like." You know what I mean? Everyone always asks, "what's it like...?" What do they mean, what's it like? They just can't think of an intelligent question to ask.

Come to think of it, I don't like Fry either.

Woody Allen's Rifkin's Festival (2020)

I liked it although I can see why people didn't. Wallace Shawn didn't seem up to it at first, but  I came to accept him. 

The film festival didn't seem very convincing. I assume there were more people at the real thing. It was no Stardust Memories. There are black and white sequences where Wallace Shawn has dreams based on scenes in old movies---Citizen Kane, Seventh Seal, Exterminating Angel and Breathless among others---which didn't work very well. 

Shawn plays a film snob who used to teach a class on the subject. He's now trying to write a novel but is hampered by his own impossibly high standards. He goes to the festival with his much younger wife who works as a press agent for a couple of directors. He suspects she's sleeping with one of them. He goes to a young (female) Spanish doctor in an open marriage for chest pains and becomes smitten. 

There's a scene where Shawn uses what I assume is correct Japanese pronunciation for Kagamusha and Tatsuya Nakadai. I've only uttered Nakadai's name once in conversation, but I want to confirm he pronounced it correctly in case I ever have to say it again.

They bring up some movies Shawn doesn't like, such as Some Like it Hot, which Allen mentioned not caring for in his memoir.

Maybe it should have bothered me that Wallace Shawn was married to and went after much younger women, but his inadequacies were blatant enough that it wasn't fooling anyone.  His motion picture debut was in Manhattan playing Diane Keaton's ex-husband and that was meant as a gag. I've seen movies about older women with much younger men and I didn't find them perverse or upsetting. 

I was going through my DVD list on Netflix eliminating anything I could simply watch on streaming video and was surprised to find that this was free on Tubi.

Old time radio

Been listening to a lot of radio shows. None of them are all that good. I thought I'd like the soap operas---they were better suited for radio with long conversations, but they weren't operatic enough. One, Aunt Mary, had a long scene of a guy eating breakfast and talking about his lousy job prospects. 

I heard a clip from another episode where Aunt Mary discusses a relative who's on trial for murder, so I thought it would be better than it was.

Radio episodes of Dragnet were surprisingly violent. In one, a disturbed high school boy had been slashing girls with a knife in the crowded hallways between classes. He somehow managed to do this dozens of times without anyone spotting him. Things were very different back then and this had gone on for weeks before the principal deigned to call the cops.  

Dragnet episodes were based on real cases. I heard that you can search old newspapers and find the ones that ended in death sentences.

You might not want to binge-listen to 15-minute radio serials. There's a certain amount of recapping every episode which means that they explain everything again every several minutes.

I guess radio was an easy gig. You just stand there and read your script. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had a show, as did James Stewart, Dick Powell and other stars who, today, would be too big for television.

There was an NBC radio series of plays by Arch Oboler including one based on Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun and The Family Nagachi broadcast in 1945 about a Japanese-American family imprisoned in internment camps during World War Two while their son was fighting the Nazis.

Here's a source for free downloads.

Halloween 2022

We had mostly middle school kids this year, and they weren't like before, timid and ashamed. They were brazen, freely taking what they wanted.

I suspect the pandemic was behind it. They missed a couple years of trick-or-treating and now they felt entitled. Also, it was raining which probably kept the little kids inside. 

I put my Covid mask on when I opened the door so I wouldn't have to smile.

"Go on! Take more! It's getting late," I said. One kid picked up all he could in one hand, but most didn't seem to want candy that bad. It made me question my taste, like I bought candy nobody liked.

I tried to make the pumpkin look like it was carved by a madman, but I don't know if it came across that way. It only took a few minutes; it wasn't much work, so that was good.

The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982)

A friend and I went to this in 1982. There were only a few people in the theater. As we were leaving, a local TV weatherman was coming in with his popcorn and drink and asked how it was. We indicated that we didn't really like it but didn't explain. I don't know if we poisoned his mind against it or if we lowered his expectations thus enhancing his enjoyment of the film. 

Now that I think about it, that guy was going to the movie alone. He was a local celebrity, but his life might not have been as glamorous as I would have imagined. It's entirely possible he had some obsessed fans himself. I knew a guy around that time who had his house burned down by a crazy woman because she thought a local newscaster lived there.

The movie is still a little hard to watch. 

Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard as delusional fans of Johnny Carson-like talk show host Jerry Langsford (Jerry Lewis). De Niro wants to start career in stand-up, but he's already 34. He doesn't have time to climb the ladder of success and decides to start at the top. He can't keep his fantasy relationship with Jerry separate from reality.

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

A little disturbing seeing The Beatles act like simpletons. Paul has to explain to George that people have two grandfathers. You wouldn't have guessed that both John and Ringo were married men.

I thought my mother might like it. It was pleasant enough. They seemed happy, smiling as they ran through the streets chased by fans. Lovely black & white photography. I had to keep telling her who was who and which ones are still living. She remembered seeing them on TV in the '60's. She thought their haircuts looked awful at the time, and I kind of agree. George's hair looked especially bad. The lack of a strong storyline bothered her.

"They're having a hard day before performing that night," I said. 

With Wilfred Brambell, then 52, as Paul's grandfather. I don't know how I feel about them calling someone younger than me a "little old man".  

Available on the Criterion channel.

My Halloween plea

Be nice. Don't try to shame or embarrass teenage trick-or-treaters.

For one thing, we have better nutrition now and that big hulking ape at your door could be eleven-years-old. 

I am deeply ashamed of the time I was at my sister's house and she was rude to some nice young men who were the only trick-or-treaters they had that year. Why would anyone do that?

I wrote last year:

...I've had older or older-looking kids come to the door. The teenagers seem kind of embarrassed and will daintily take only one. You have to encourage them....

I had a friend who trick-or-treated at sixteen because he needed the food. He was malnourished. He was arrested one night when he was thirteen while searching for food in a dumpster. He thought they would feed him in juvenile detention but it was too late. Dinner was over. He thought he'd at least get to eat in the morning, but his otherwise negligent mother rushed down before breakfast to get him out.

There used to be an old woman in town who would write an annual letter to the editor denouncing trick-or-treating as extortion. It's a common complaint along with Halloween being Satanic. When these people are rude to a teenager politely hoping for candy, I guess they think they're bravely standing up to a Satanic extortion attempt.

As it happens, my old friend later spent several years in the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. His mental health hadn't yet declined when he was in high school, but when a teenager says "trick or treat", he could really mean it.

Now that I think about it, he said he had been out throwing eggs on Halloween, so lack of food wasn't his primary problem.

Force Four (1975)

I kind of liked this. A karate movie. Mostly Black cast. In the credits they list the actors and their belt rankings. A few were fifth degree black belts. I hope the one with only a first degree black belt didn't feel bad. One stunt man had a white belt.

I don't think there was any explanation for everyone knowing karate and no one shooting anybody. 

The fight scenes weren't dramatic, but there were no camera or editing tricks. In the '80's, when martial arts movies staged a comeback, that's how my friends and I judged them. We didn't like heavily edited fight scenes.

Made six years before the karate movie, Force: Five.

Four martial artists set out to retrieve a stolen African artifact.

Free on Tubi.

Frankenstein, 1931

Fairly short, around 70 minutes. The monster was more pitiful than I remembered, but it killed a child which I don't think you'd see in a movie today. More gruesome and disturbing to me now than it used to be. Young Frankenstein couldn't completely ruin it.

Reportedly, they were worried that six-year-old child actor Marilyn Harris would be frightened of Boris Karloff in full make-up, but she responded to him the way her character did in the movie. She went right to him and asked to ride with him to the location.

Spacey beats Rapp

He certainly LOOKS guilty.

Anthony Rapp lost his $40 million sexual battery lawsuit against Kevin Spacey. Reportedly, the layout of Spacey's apartment did the trick. Spacey blubbing on the witness stand didn't hurt anything, either.

Rapp claimed that when he was fourteen, he was invited to a party at Spacey's apartment. He realized all the other guests were grown-ups so he wandered off to a bedroom and watched TV until Spacey came in and tried to play his dirty numbers on him. Turns out that Spacey lived in a studio apartment. It was all one room.

I don't know what explanation Rapp's side offered for this. Spacey's defense was hurt by the fact that he publicly apologized when the accusation was first made. He said he was talked into it by his publicist. 

I guess I'm neutral now. Spacey apologized but said at the time that he didn't remember it and Rapp didn't quite remember it, either, but he's 50 talking about something when he was fourteen.

We'll see how the other cases go.

 

The Chicken Heart

Bill Cosby did a routine long ago. I heard it on one of his records a half century ago. About being terrified listening to a radio show about "the chicken heart".

Turns out this was a real thing---a real radio show at least. It's short, eight minutes.

Bill Cosby's thing is on YouTube, as well:

https://youtu.be/fE0hHEtkkQA

He even named the show, Lights Out.

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (documentary, Sweden, 2021)

It was an odd decision to make the publicity and advertising for Death in Venice focus on the boy. I don't think he had any lines. He just walked around looking pretty. I don't know how Dirk Bogarde felt since he was the actual star.

Death in Venice was a 1971 Italian movie based on a short novel by Thoman Mann about a widower who goes alone to a resort in Venice. There, he becomes smitten with a lovely aristocratic Polish kid named Tadzio. He gazes at him, follows his family around town at one point.

There is another documentary on the Criterion Channel about the search for an actor to play Tadzio. In the book, he was 12, but none of the kids were good-looking enough until they found Bjorn Andreson who was a teenager. 

When Death in Venice was shown at Cannes, director Luchino Visconti said that Andreson was "the most beautiful boy in the world", and that became their ad slogan. Posters for the movie featured Bjorn, not Dirk Bogarde as the old guy who found himself obsessed with the poor kid. Instead of showing Bogarde's character as dangerously confused, the publicity made it look like a perfectly normal reaction to the most breathtaking high school freshman on Earth. 

No teenage boy wants to be "beautiful". A few might, but they should snap out of it. When Andreson went back to school, his classmates cruelly called him "Angel Lips". 

Bjorn Andreson is in his 70's now. He had a difficult childhood, didn't know who his father was and was raised by his grandmother after a certain point. It sounds like the publicity for the film was more of a problem than the film itself. It was a bad experience that dragged on for years.

Available on the Criterion Channel.