Things probably not going well

Anonymous keeps shutting down the RT website. The hacktivists want everyone to watch only CNN. What rebels!

The EU is shutting down all Russian media. Which is stupid because RT's reporting doesn't show things going well for Russia. 

In Ukraine, meanwhile, the mayors of two towns have ordered that looters be shot on sight, and they consider stores raising prices to be "looting". It's hard to picture local cops murdering shop owners. 

Ukraine has lifted age restrictions on military recruits. They took anyone 18 to 60 already which seemed pretty wide-open. They're opening prisons, handing assault rifles to inmates. It's only been five days. Are they that already that desperate?

I thought Russia would fire some missiles at Ukrainian bases and leave it at that, like the United States does all the time. People thought Russia would need twice as many troops. Ukraine is enormous with a population of 44 million. I don't know why they need to arm criminals or the elderly. 

Bear in mind, the U.S. hasn't won a war at least since World War Two (in which the Soviets did most of the fighting). It's been argued that the Invasion of Grenada is the only war the U.S. has won since the Spanish-American War. Israel hasn't won a war since 1973. It's possible to do pretty well without winning.

If Putin is voted out, who will take his place? The Communists had the second biggest party after Putin's Russia United.

Bob Newhart on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 1963

Alfred Hitchcock Presents was great as a half  hour show. Having it drag on for an hour wasn't an improvement, like the one season they made The Twilight Zone an hour show. 

Bob Newhart's wife doesn't seem that bad, but everyone agrees that she's terrible and that he's a saint for staying with her. They're upper-middle-class and she inherited their money from her mother so he'd take a hit financially if he left her. She tells him she won't give him a divorce, so Newhart tries to convince her that he's plotting to murder her. He leave boxes of poison open in the kitchen where he fixes her coffee, he keeps appearing suddenly with a knife or a straight razor and he digs what looks like a grave in the garden.

Should I give away the ending? He makes it look like she tried to murder him and she ends up in prison.

It was an earlier time and TV characters had to be punished for their crimes. So, in the end, Bob Newhart's comeuppance is that he has to give up his stripper girlfriend and start dating a less attractive woman. She knew what he had done but hadn't come forward while his wife was on trial.

It wasn't funny. Hitchcock's introduction was especially unamusing. Now I understand why Orson Welles hated that crap.

Bob Newhart's second acting credit. He took an odd path to stardom. His record, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, came first. The record was a huge hit and it was only then that he started performing stand-up.

Prince Charles infects his mother with COVID

95-year-old Elizabeth II has tested positive for COVID-19, apparently getting it from Charles who tested positive last week. Several people in the palace have gotten it, too, so Charles has been spreading it around perhaps in a bid to be crowned king before he turns eighty. He's only 73 but he doesn't look too good and the queen could easily cling to life another seven years. Her mother lived to 101. 

We don't really know who the queen's father was or how long he lived since she and her sisters were conceived through artificial insemination. They look nothing alike and may have had different fathers.

Instead of self-isolating, the queen will callously continue "light duties" and possibly spread the disease some more.

It shows that having already been infected doesn't give you immunity, at least not from the current variant. Charles tested positive for COVID-19 back in March, 2020.

"This isn't the corona-tion one was expecting, to be honest," the commoner who ran the prince's Twitter feed posted at the time.

Wolf's Hole (Czechoslovakia, 1987)

I always assumed kids in Communist countries were better than the ones here, although a couple of Soviet movies made them look worse.

Wolf's Hole was about 9 or 10 exceptionally bratty Czechoslovakian teens who go on a ski trip. They're in a cabin in the mountains where they'll be for several days. They notice strange behavior in the adults running the thing.

If you're ever on a trip like this, even if meals are provided, bring your own food.

I clicked on this movie knowing nothing about it. Turned out to be science fiction. Set on a snow-covered mountain, it was like a toned-down version of The Thing.

American critics and academics interpret movies from any Communist country as being secretly anti-Communist. This film was no exception even though principles of Marxism-Leninism end up saving them.

Has a pretty good twist on that "Chekhov's gun" thing.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

 

High Noon's Oedipal conflict

I hadn't thought about this, and I don't know if it's an original thought, but High Noon was really Freudian. Gary Cooper is a pretty obvious father figure and he's in an Oedipal conflict with Lloyd Bridges who wants to take over as marshal when Cooper leaves. Bridges takes it way too personally that he's not getting the position and Cooper would literally rather die than just let him have the stupid job.

Not only does Bridges want to replace Cooper as marshal, he's also hanging around Cooper's ex-girlfriend, Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado). Cooper himself is on good terms with Ramirez, but he marries Grace Kelly who is less than half his age. Kelly's character obviously has a Electra complex in a disguised form.

There was other inter-generational stuff. Gary Cooper goes to his predecessor in the job (Lon Chaney, Jr, who was five years younger than Cooper) for help. He tells Cooper he's too old. Then a local eighth grader (Ralph Reed) who's big for his age offers to help.

I wrote about this before, but Shane was made the next year and took it way further.

In the opening scene, the father, Van Heflin, threatens Shane (Alan Ladd) by waving around an unloaded rifle that doesn't work anymore. Pretty obvious symbolism there. They had given the gun to the kid to play with. 

Shane moves in with the family. The wife (Jean Arthur) falls in love with him, the son (Brandon de Wilde) idolizes him and, in the end, Van Heflin announces that he's going to town and will intentionally get himself killed so that Shane can sleep with his wife.

Christopher Forbes' ROCKET HUNTER (2022)

Truly unwatchable. World War Two movie. Seemed to be inspired by the 1930 movie Hell's Angels. That movie ended with two brothers flying a single captured German plane to blow up German munitions before an allied offensive in World War One. In Rocket Hunter, there's a flashback to the two brothers going to a WWI movie in 1930. They fly off in a B-17, just the two of them, to bomb a Nazi rocket factory. 

People on IMDb keep attacking it for using remote control model airplanes and a model railroad, but I liked those things. They had close-ups of guys playing the pilots obviously in front of a green screen, obviously not in anything resembling an airplane. 

It was the lack of plot and some random disconnected subplots that killed it.

It had a Jewish engineer forced to work for the Nazis so they won't murder his family, but then they made a Polish slave laborer the bad guy. 

I've been watching some of these terrible movies which I assume were shot in three or four days. There were some that were okay, that you could at least sit though, that had nothing in them that would have cost any money. Their biggest expense was renting an Airbnb for the weekend.

But then you have Christopher Forbes movies. I watched some his westerns that had horses, reasonably good costumes, prop guns and western movie sets. They put at least a little money into them as they did into this movie, but everything else about them was so terrible. Forbes has 40 directing credits on IMDb, so he's doing fine. He might think about having someone else write his scripts.

Someone compared it to the work of Ed Wood, but Plan 9 From Outer Space had a lot of plot. It had at least five subplots that all tied together in the end. Rocket Hunter was random, boring, meaningless scenes.

Free on Tubi and Amazon Prime. Go watch!

Whoopi Goldberg

If she didn't blurt out crazy opinions, Whoopi Goldberg wouldn't be on The View in the first place. Remember when she said that Roman Polanski drugging and sodomizing a child wasn't "rape rape"? This is her only gig.

In fairness, I've had people explain to me that Israel couldn't possibly be racist because Jews and Palestinians aren't races. If I remember correctly, Natalie Portman wrote a letter to the Harvard student newspaper explaining that Israel isn't racist in part because a lot of Jews look about the same as Palestinians.

At least now, when people make those arguments, we can throw Whoopi Goldberg in their faces.

Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

I haven't seen it. Didn't know it existed, but Rotten Tomatoes says reviews were 93% positive, so here's a dissenting voice:

I didn’t hate Joel Coen's film of Macbeth, but it did leave me feeling kind of empty. As so often with Coen’s movies, it largely riffs off of previous Macbeth films, lifting from Welles and Kurosawa–both much more intriguing and satisfying interpretations than this one. But in it’s cold, noirish b/w Coen avoids the film closest in spirit to the play, Polanski’s splatterfest made soon after Sharon Tate’s murder, a truly unnerving cinematic experience. Moreover, the two lead actors are both old enough to play Lear, defusing one of the propulsive forces of the play. Coen’s Macbeth has all the sexual tension of Ronnie and Nancy plotting the political knifing of Jerry Ford and the October Surprise against Carter…

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/02/04/roaming-charges-42/

That's from Jeffrey St. Clair. 

He's probably right about the stars' advanced ages. 67-year-old Denzel Washington says he wants to play King Lear next. 

Reagan was 69 when he was elected which actually seems pretty young now.

https://www.mailplus.co.uk/edition/showbiz/151351/baz-on-friday-bitten-by-the-bard-bug...-denzel-aims-for-king-lear