Ken Park (2002)

Larry Clark directed, made in the wake of Kids and Bully. Those first two movies were disturbing but were taken seriously. The ones Clark made after that just seem perverse.

Four or five unconnected subplots. A suburban California teen is sleeping with his girlfriend’s mother, another is abused by his father who we see urinating with his pants around his ankles; a girl is forced into a strange marriage-like ceremony with her devoutly religious father after he catches her in her underwear sitting on her boyfriend who she tied to the bed and an awful kid is enraged at his custodial grandmother for not respecting his privacy which he needs because he practices autoerotic asphyxiation at odd times during the day.

The subplots never really come together, but three of the teens have a sex scene at the end without explanation. The sex in this thing was either unsimulated or not simulated enough.

Written by Harmony Korine.

In the ‘80’s, there were John Hughes movies and films like Stand By Me and the French movie Cross My Heart, movies where the adults were either mean or ineffectual while the kids were foul-mouthed but pure of heart. That evolved into movies like Clark's and Beavis and Butt-head. The grown-ups were about the same but now the kids were awful, too.

Ready for Father's Day circa 1969

I don't know because I'm out of the game, but Father's Day must be coming up

I posted this photo some years ago and I saw that someone just tweeted it. Here are all the biggest child actors on CBS whenever this picture was taken. There's Billy Mumy from Lost in Space, Barry and Stanley Livingston from My Three Sons, Ron and Clint Howard from The Andy Griffith Show and Gentle Ben, and Anissa Jones and Johnny Whitaker from Family Affair.

I think I said the same thing about it last time---that out of seven child stars, four (two pairs) are siblings. This may be disheartening for would-be child actors without an older brother who already has a show. 

I think Johnny Whitaker's pants are unzipped. More than fifty years later, the picture is still in circulation. He'll live with that shame the rest of his life.

A Million Ways to Die in the West (Seth MacFarlane, 2014)

I liked it okay. $3.74 on Amazon. I got free shipping so I couldn't go wrong. A comedy about how terrible life in the Old West must have been. This point was perhaps undermined by the $40 million production values. Andy Warhol's dingy, grainy Lonesome Cowboys made it look less appealing even without the murder and the accidental deaths.

According to a bonus feature it was filmed without benefit of greenscreen. If true, the lesson is to go ahead and use greenscreen.

The Fugitive (1993)

I guess I understand why people liked this thing, but why did they like it so much? It would have been better if Harrison Ford had killed Tommy Lee Jones when he had the chance. Better still if Jones hadn't been in it at all.

Global warming is literally murdering us

There was a 1975 movie called 92 in the Shade. It was on HBO back then when we subscribed to it. With Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Margo Kidder.

I never watched it and I don't know if this is true, but according to the Home Box Office guide, 92 degrees is the temperature at which murders are most likely to occur.

That came to mind when I read this on another website:

Maybe the “crime wave” isn’t the fault of progressive prosecutors after all: “Research shows that on average, violent crime increases by over 5% on days hotter than 85 degrees compared to days below that threshold. Studies mapping violent crime and weather in L.A. and Chicago show violence reliably rising with the temperature.”

Hard to believe that researchers were so much more precise in the '70's coming up with 92 degrees as the peak murder temperature.

At the time, I had the impression that the movie was a sort of overwrought romance gone bad, but it turns out it was about weirdly violent competition between charter fishing boat operators. 

A Rider Named Death (Russia, 2004)

It was twenty or thirty years ago. I was at a gallery opening. I was pouring the wine. There was some legal theory about why I wouldn’t be liable for the college students who were sucking it down. A young fellow started talking to me, telling me he was really into the Unabomer manifesto which had just been published. I hadn’t read it but I told him that the Unabomer was bourgeois. He correctly accepted the Marxist critique of industrial society but couldn’t imagine the Marxist solution of working class political action. Real revolutions are rare, but the Unabomer never explained how mailing bombs to people, killing three, was going to change anything.

The guy looked at me strangely and walked away. It could be that he didn't really take the manifesto seriously and was surprised anyone did.

It’s basically what you had in this movie. Based on an autobiographical novel by Boris Savinkov who was head of the “paramilitary wing”, a cell of the Russian Social Revolutionary Party, around 1905. They shot and threw bombs at aristocratic government ministers.

They discuss what made individuals in the group adopt violence. They were anti-Marxist and against proletarian revolution. It was set around the time of the failed 1905 revolution, but that didn’t interest them. One guy was a devout Christian who said he was doing it out of love.

Except for one guy, they were all upper class---elite murdering elite, which had some appeal as a movie. They were killing people I didn't sympathize with but doing it for reasons that weren't very well thought out and killing themselves in the process.

As it happened, the Social Revolutionary Party under Kerensky took power in 1917. They turned out to be fairly normal reformist politicians, so that didn’t last long.

Touch of Evil, 1958

I don't think I'd seen this in over twenty-five years. I had it on VHS. Back then, I focused on form rather than content, marveling at the long opening crane shot and the six minute sequence shot in the apartment. Finally seeing it again, I ignored all that and enjoyed the movie. They didn't waste any time. It was fast-moving. The story covers just a day or two. I liked Henry Mancini's soundtrack even if Orson Welles had something different in mind; I find Charelton Heston objectionable in general and didn't care that he played a Mexican. 

Orson Welles as a corrupt detective in a seedy border town. Heston plays a Mexican official fighting narcotics smuggling.  He's putting Akim Tamiroff's brother on trial in Mexico City leaving Akim in charge of his crime family such as it is.

Zsa Zsa Gabor appeared briefly but made it into the opening credits. According to IMDb, Eva Gabor was in there, too, somewhere, sadly unacknowledged.  

If you want to compare and contrast the theories of Welles and Renoir with those of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, watch Touch of Evil and Psycho, both black and white genre films exemplifying the two approaches, both with Janet Leigh being menaced in a motel room.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Ezra Miller going into treatment

He doesn't LOOK crazy.

Anyone interested in this will have read it elsewhere, but Ezra Miller is going into treatment for "complex mental health issues". It had been reported that he was seen with his mother which gave the impression they were going to get him some help.

There's SOMETHING wrong with Miller. But it's like a long article I once read about The Exorcist. The book and therefore the movie were based very, very loosely on real events. A 14-year-old boy was exorcised in the late '40's. A reporter tracked down the last surviving people involved in the case. Spoke with the only priest who was still alive, spoke with the kid himself very briefly before he hung up on him. He spoke to the kid's friends. 

The kid was the Cartman of their group. He was the friend nobody liked. They essentially said that he wasn't possessed---he was just a jerk.

So does Miller really have some psychiatric condition or is he just a jackass? Either way, psychotherapy won't hurt anything.

I still hope he gets convicted of a felony. Guns aren't doing him any good.

Armie Hammer's awful aunt

Something called Discovery Plus has a three part documentary coming in September about Armie Hammer's troubles. The paid consultant for the series is his aunt Casey Hammer. It's hard to imagine she has inside information.

From Showbiz 411:

Casey is the sister of Armie’s father, Michael. She hates the family (despite the money) and is willing to be the Mary Trump, so to speak, in this case. So there will be no Thanksgiving dinner this year for the Hammers. I hope whatever they paid her is worth it. You can read my Hammer family story here.

My attitude toward this is, interesting as the Hammer family is, Armie deserves a chance to recover, explain himself, and apologize. We don’t know everything that happened, just the surface. This doc is not going to give us any understanding.

A press release promises:

“Each episode will shine a light on a depraved pattern of abuse that extends far beyond the accusations brought against the disgraced actor. Coupled with a trove of incredible archival footage, House of Hammer weaves together a chilling story of the dysfunction and wickedness that grow behind decades of power and money.”

Armie Hammer has reportedly been reduced to selling timeshares in Cayman islands. If you want to meet a celebrity, find out what Johnny Depp or Timothee Chalamet are really like, go shopping for time shares in the Caribbean.

Ezra Miller, dangerous monster

He has terrible taste.

Violent recidivist criminal Ezra Miller has been charged with "felony burglary" in Vermont. I hope they convict him before he kills somebody. Convicted felons can't possess firearms and Miller reportedly pulled a gun on the mother of a 12-year-old girl he was grooming because she used the word "tribe" and questioned his contention that Parcheesi was related to Rastafarianism. The woman has gotten a restraining order.

Miller lives on his unlicensed marijuana farm and had a young mother and her three children ages 1, 4 and 5 staying there. The place is littered with guns. A photo reportedly showed an assault rifle leaning against a wall next to a pile of stuffed toys and the one-year-old was found with some loose ammunition in her mouth.

Now the mother and children have disappeared. When Child Protective Services showed up to remove the children, Miller told them falsely that they hadn't been there in two months.

The press hasn't speculated, but in the comments section of a tabloid article online, readers thought Miller may have murdered them. The fact that people would even suspect this has got to be a problem.

Miller is the star of a yet to be released $200 million superhero movie. He plays The Flash, a Jewish guy who can run really fast. Reportedly, Warner Brothers is weighing its options. If Miller "gets help", they might release it like normal. If he doesn't, they may release it but not let him promote or publicize it; if things go REALLY bad, they'll scrap it completely.

Miller demands that people refer to him with the pronouns "they" or "them" which makes it hard to follow articles about him. 

Ed Wood (1994)

Made before Obamacare, it had a subplot where Bela Lugosi goes into treatment for morphine addiction and is kicked out of the hospital for want of health insurance. This didn't happen. In reality, Lugosi checked into a public hospital and came out a new man. 

"Now you know how Dracula really felt," a reporter quipped at the time. 

This could have been seen as an argument for free universal healthcare.

Ed Wood is still topical. The story of a transvestite hired to make a movie about a man going through a sex change. Other than the Baptists who bankrolled Plan 9, the characters were all very accepting. Ed Wood takes off his wig before speaking to Orson Welles when he spots him in a bar, but he's still wearing lipstick and a dress and Welles doesn't bat an eye. 

Made around the same time as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.

Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker. Black & white. Directed by Tim Burton.

Quiz Show (1994) John Tuturro, Ralph Fiennes

Jewish proletarian Herb Stempel was the more sympathetic character, but look at poor upper-class WASP Charles Van Doren withering in the shadow his far more successful parents. Appearing on a rigged game show finally gave him something that made him special. 

They both cheated. Herb Stempel told the truth about it first, before Van Doren did, but that's because his phony winning streak ended first and Van Doren was given a high-paying job on The Today Show, the sort of gig Stempel had been promised but never received. 

Directed by Robert Redford. I'm not really familiar with the movies he's directed except this and Ordinary People, but I've heard that films about WASPs like himself are sort of his thing. Everyone has an ethnicity. Some are less colorful than others, but we all have our problems.  

Stir Crazy (1980)

I thought it was pretty good 42 years ago, but watched it again for the first time in decades. Broad comedy turned prison escape movie. Movies must have been slower in 1980. Prison movies depress me anyway. 

Directed by Sidney Poitier. Stars Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor as New Yorkers who head west and end up in an Arizona prison for a crime they didn't commit.

Gene Wilder shows a cartoonish ability to ride a mechanical bull. He and Pryor and some prisoners they befriended plan to escape during an inter-prison inmate rodeo the warden forces him to participate in.

I've seen the same problem in other prison escape comedies. In this one, they befriend an enormous terrifying mass murderer (Erland van Lidth) who killed his extended family then murdered people who reminded him of his family. He's a great help to them as they break out, but they leave him behind without a thought. They couldn't very well unleash him on the world, but it seems rude to just leave him.

They did help Georg Stanford Brown escape. He said he murdered his stepfather.

The King's Speech (2010)

The stupidity of hereditary monarchy compounded by live radio. It would have been so easy to pre-record the king's actual speech. There was a scene where the speech therapist effortlessly makes a phonograph record of the then-future king reading fluently. At the time, speeches by Winston Churchill were re-enacted on radio by a Winston Churchill impersonator and no one was the wiser.

Rated R for scenes of the king using obscene language as part of his therapy.

The king has a speech impediment. He was openly mocked by his family and seems pitiful but he's still kind of a jerk at times.

His speech therapist insists on treating everyone as equals and calling "Bertie" by his nickname, but he's also aghast that King Edward was intent on marrying a divorcee and he casually suggests Bertie give him a knighthood.