Fail-Safe, Sidney Lumet, 1964

Made the same year as Dr Strangelove, it covered the same territory. Much if it takes place in the War Room. They watch the planes on the big board. Fail-Safe was an independent film. Its release was delayed so Dr Strangelove would be first.

Supersonic U.S. bombers mistakenly head off to nuke Moscow and can’t be recalled. The U.S. president Henry Fonda, speaking through interpreter Larry Hagman, talks to the Soviet premiere by phone.

In this movie, the president can essentially order people to commit suicide and they’ll do it. There are the bomber crews, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow who waits to die on the roof of the embassy rather than fleeing into the countryside, and there are fighter pilots who run out of fuel and go down in the arctic ocean trying to shoot down the planes.

  

If I were in a bomber and the president’s voice came over the radio telling me to turn around, I think the wise thing to do would be to turn around. Why kill yourself blowing up a city full of people when you have an excuse not to? If it turns out to be a Soviet guy doing an impression of the president, let them have that victory. Make the guy happy. Don't murder millions of people as your last act on Earth.

With Walter Matthau expressing the same thoughts George C. Scott did in Dr Strangelove. With Dom DeLuise and Sorrell Brooke.

Directed by Sidney Lumet.

 

Free on Movieland.Tv.

I Drink Your Blood (1970)

Satanists come to town. They brutalize a young woman. When her grandfather, a veterinarian, goes to confront them, they rough him up, force him to take LSD and send him home.

So the 11-year-old brother/grandson takes matters into his hands. You have to admire him for that, but it turns out that infecting people with rabies can backfire. It quicky infects some workers who come to the tiny community to help.

They took the term "hydrophobia" too literally. In this movie, you can ward off the zombie-like rabies victims with a garden hose or by splashing water on them. 

I'll warn you, though. It would have been a perfectly nice movie about a child getting even with Satan worshipers if they hadn't done terrible things to animals. They didn't kill any on camera, but there was a dead chicken, a number of dead rats and a dead goat. Why do they do that?

The kid in it, Riley Mills, had been a stage actor. He has two credits on IMDb---this and an episode Family Affair. The poor guy died in 2001 at age 42.

Columbo, Prescription: Murder (Made-for-TV, 1968)

Peter Falk looks so young. He's kind of a jerk in this one, although he was being a jerk to the accomplice of a psychopathic killer so I shouldn't hold that against him. 

In recent discussions of "The Goldwater Rule", it was pointed out how far psychiatry has advanced since the '60s. Psychiatrists back then were Freudians. They declared Goldwater unfit for office due to toilet training and oedipal issues. 

So a psychiatrist like the one in this movie might not have recognized his own psychopathy and thought he was just being logical when he slept with his patient and murdered his wife.

I didn't like the ending. There was at least one later episode where Columbo uses the same trick to catch the killer. Anyone could have done that.

Accused of Murder (1956)

A film noir in color they're showing on the Criterion Channel. It was quite bad, I'm afraid, although it might be a lesson for young people that nothing good can come of talking to police. The Czechoslovakian emigre they suspect of the crime keeps telling the detective how much she trusts him and believes him when he tells her she doesn't need a lawyer.

A corrupt attorney is shot dead in his beautiful Lincoln Continental Mark II.

Wide screen. Mostly medium shot. It's a Republic picture and there were a lot takes where they did that old B movie thing where two people are speaking and they both face the camera, one closer to it than the other. It works very well.

Lee Van Cleef as a weirdly evil police sergeant who chuckles when he walks in on the lieutenant making out with a suspect. He and Elisha Cook were the only actors I recognized.

There was really no one to get behind. There was the woman who worked in a dance club who spotted the hitman given the task of murdering the victim. She tried to blackmail him but got drunk and went about it in a terribly unwise way. Just an old B movie except in color.

"King" Charles cracks down on royal subjects

"Oy! What's all this then!"

The British are now arresting people for criticizing monarchy. It was reported a couple of years ago that when the queen finally died, they were going to get Charles coronated very quickly, before people started questioning whether they needed a parasitic royal family at all.

A professor was arrested for yelling "Who elected him!" at an appearance by Charles. Cops dragged him away and said they may still charge him with a crime for asking an obvious question. Even implied criticism is a crime. 

Maybe leaving the EU means they no longer have free speech protections normal countries have.

I would have been tempted to yell, "Who died and made you king!" and then, as police dragged me away, I would tell them "I was asking a question!" Then I'd demand to speak to the American consulate.

Big Game (Finland, 2014)

It was the opposite of Air Force One. The president's 747 is shot down in the mountains of Finland. He's freed from his escape pod by tween Laplander Onni Tommila who was in the woods alone with a bow and arrow to prove himself as a hunter for his thirteenth birthday. He's crushed to discover that his father has no faith in his ability to do this. "I am nothing," he says.  He decides that saving the president (Samuel L. Jackson) from terrorists bent on capturing him is just as good as killing a deer. And the president definitely needs help. He was no Harrison Ford.

The amazing thing to me is that it was made for $10 million. Not enough for a Woody Allen movie, but they get way, WAY more for their money in Europe, especially Finland, apparently. Why do Allen's movies cost so much?

There's a reference to E.T. The president with a blanket over him looking like the alien in the basket of Elliot's bicycle. At one point, Onni tells the president, "My forest, my rules," which was like a line from The King's Speech although it's a strange place for that reference if it was one. And they recreate one of the less plausible moments from Tommila's earlier film, Rare Exports which was also written and directed by his uncle, Jalmari Helander, with his father, Jorma Tommila, playing his father.

They did come up with a plausible reason for abducting or killing the president, something other movies fail to do. There is a vice president, after all. It's not going to change anything.

My dream about the queen's death

I told about this before.

A few years ago, I dreamed I was in England to attend the queen's funeral. The queen was lying in state somewhere and I was going to go pay my respects such as they were, but I didn't know where she was. There was a cop standing there, so I was going to go ask him, "Where's the queen at?" But then I realized that since the queen was dead, there was a NEW queen and he wouldn't know if I meant the late queen or the new queen, so I didn't ask.

I slowly woke up and realized that I could have phrased the question differently and if the guy misunderstood, I could explain what I meant.

I also realized that if the queen really was dead, I might be psychic so I quickly googled it and, no, she was fine.

Roddy Bogawa’s I was Born But… (2004)

I should make a documentary! Movie is mostly a series of long static shots of buildings and businesses. There’s a long take of his father practicing his golf swing and later Bogawa himself, apparently, skeet shooting. It starts with his punk rock band performing a monotonous “song” that drags on for over five minutes. Shot on 16mm. Squandering all that money on filmstock was the only thing that might have given it any credibility. The guy didn’t even come up with his own title---stole it from Ozu.

I don’t know if they still make filmstrips. You have a strip of still pictures on 35mm film you run through a projector, sort of a poor man’s slide show. They used to show them a lot in school and they were a popular toy in the Soviet Union---all the kids had them. It’s something Bogawa might have considered using instead of spending thousands on movie film. It might have given it a punk rock aesthetic although he wasn’t hurting for money. He impulsively flies to Hawaii in the middle of this.

According to the internet, he somehow got a job as a film professor.

90 minutes.  

On the Criterion Channel until the end of the month.

Ezra Miller, Pat Robertson, Bruce Jenner

He has no taste at all in women's clothes.

I do refer to Chelsea Manning by her current name and sex, but I just can't give a crap about Bruce Jenner or Ezra Miller. Miller thought "sir" was a pronoun and demanded that a cop address him as "they" or "them".

It might be less confusing if writers would use "they" or "them" as singular pronouns in these cases, like say "they is a movie star" or "them was on a talk show." It sounds stupid, but wouldn't it be correct if you're referring to one person?

Remember when TV evangelist Pat Robertson tried to run for president? He had lashed out against "political correctness" for watering down language. But then he got his Depends in a bunch whenever anyone called him a "TV evangelist" and demanded they call him a "religious broadcaster". God forbid anyone specifies whether he's on TV or radio. The press now stupidly calls all these people "religious broadcasters" and they call anything religious "faith based". Just say what you mean. Don't be pushed around by Pat Robertson.

Has there been any word on the mother and her two children who disappeared while staying on Ezra Miller's marijuana farm? Shouldn't they have turned up by now?

Jean Luc Godard

I don’t know what to say about him. He died at age 91, through assisted suicide, one report said because, he said, he was “exhausted”. I don't know if he had any condition other than being 91.

In a documentary about Agnes Varda, he left her a rude note on his door when she went to see him at his home somewhere. I don’t know what his problem was or if Agnes read too much into it. There was the unkind letter he wrote to Truffaut after the success of Day for Night. I thought he made a pretty good point. Truffaut was a well-known swinger, but his character, the director he played, was the only one in the movie who didn't have a sex scene. We kept seeing  him alone in bed dreaming of cinema. 

I haven’t seen too many of Godard’s movies. I saw the beginning of Every Man for Himself and turned it off. I watched Contempt and thought it was weird that Jack Palance was in a high brow French art film.

I liked Breathless and I would have liked Alphaville if it had been a straight movie and less of an allegory. 

At some point, Godard started filming everything static camera which worked very well most of the time, but it didn’t work terribly well in parts of Hail Mary. That movie was set in what was then the present day. A virgin named Mary becomes pregnant. It’s a mystery to her boyfriend, Joseph. It was condemned by the Catholic Church in part because Mary keeps taking her clothes off.

I liked Film socialisme. I watched one of his movies with Woody Allen, something about King Lear, but I didn’t understand it and Allen was wasted in it. And I liked Detective with 40-year-old Jean-Pierre Leaud in the title role but haven't been able to find it again.

Steven Spielberg: It's all a lie

They make that face in all his movies.

Spielberg's been lying about his past for years. He claimed that as a teenager, he found a way to sneak into a movie studio; he found an empty office, moved in and started pretending to be a movie producer and when he was caught, they were so impressed they gave him a job.

It's a stupid story. It makes him sound childish and it was debunked years ago, but he continues to tell it as if it were true. Try breaking into HIS offices and see if he gives you a job.

So Spielberg has made a supposedly autobiographical movie called The Fabelmans.  I really don't believe anything he says that makes his life sound in any way interesting. 

Bernardo Bertolucci claimed that, as a child, he ordered other children around as they played, a natural-born movie director. When Conan O'Brien got his talk show he told about taking tap dancing lessons as a child as part of his lifelong drive to eventually become a late night talk show host. In Day for Night, Truffaut shows himself sleeping at night dreaming about stealing a movie poster as a child. It's all nonsense.

Reportedly, Spielberg does the same thing in this movie, showing how childhood experiences led inexorably to him becoming a Hollywood billionaire.

"My Son Hunter" review on Gawker

A review of a Breitbart production, a film on Hunter Biden:

'My Son Hunter' fails to own the libs

I haven't seen the movie so I can't vouch for this review. Maybe it's really good.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, UK-Canada-Germany, 2011)

Carl Jung's Oedipal conflict with Freud comes to a head. It was apparently fairly accurate, based on a play based on a book.

Jung read Freud's writings on psychoanalysis and tries it out, but Freud never mentioned having patients lie on a couch. Jung (Michael Fassbinder) sits in a chair taking notes while his patient (Kiera Knightly) sits in another chair facing away from him.

Another patient, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), a psychoanalyst himself who Freud considers Jung's superior, tells Jung he should sleep with his patient and Jung actually gives it a try.

Filmed in Germany and Vienna.

Freud (Viggo Mortensen) smokes constantly. Freud himself smoked twenty or more cigars a day, equal to a full carton of cigarettes for the amount of nicotine he got. It's amazing how long he lived.

Freud had his problems, but Jung always seemed like a nut to me. In this movie, he tells Freud they should study telepathy. He says a couple of times that he doesn't believe in coincidence. I don't think a belief in "synchronicity" would necessarily preclude there being a coincidence here and there.

Timothee Chalamet on red carpet

It's been days and no one else will say it so I will, not that anyone will care, but that is an ugly, ugly outfit. Doesn't even look comfortable.

The Sunshine Boys (1975)

I watched The Sunshine Boys (1975) with Walter Matthau and George Burns as a couple of really old vaudevillians. I've seen it several times over the years. There was something I didn't notice before.

In the part where Matthau and Burns perform their skit, it really picks up when Burns enters the scene. He had been an actual vaudevillian in his day and he made Matthau pick up the pace. It was sort of funny after that.

Free on Movieland Tv if nowhere else.

Day of the Dolphin (Mike Nichols, 1973)

A serious drama about a dolphin that was taught to speak and understand English with a limited vocabulary. 

"Was he---excited?" George C. Scott says when he heard the animal sexually harassed a female assistant.

They get a lady dolphin to join him in the tank after that.

People using scientific wonders or miracles of nature to do stupid crap has long been a mainstay of cinema. In Der Golem (1920) a rabbi brings a huge clay figure to life and his assistant uses it to kill a guy for sleeping with his girlfriend.

In this movie, government conspirators use the talking dolphins in a plot to assassinate the president.

Kind of a sad story. It was more violent but similar to a Flipper episode in some respects. Give them simple instructions and the dolphins have more on the ball than anyone imagined.

Directed by Mike Nichols. Written by Buck Henry.

Free on Movieland.Tv.

Ten Wanted Men, Randolph Scott, 1955

Started with a stage coach being hijacked by Mexicans bandits. One sits holding a gun on two prosperous-looking passengers.

The stagecoach, with Mexicans on horseback firing guns into the air, rides to a ranch. Turns out it was all a practical joke! Good thing they picked the right stage coach. The two men inside were Randolph Scott's brother and nephew.

“Welcome to Arizona!”

I understand that people back then weren’t as intelligent as they are now, but why do they do things like this in westerns?

An impoverished young Latina girl had been taken in by rich guy Richard Boone. Now she has blossomed and he’s in love with her.

“Your jealousy is like a craziness!” she says.

She escapes to Randolph Scott’s ranch. Now Richard Boone is targeting Randolph Scott’s operation.

Scott was rather stiff playing a paragon of the Old West. The town looked like a hell hole which, realistically, it would be. I wouldn’t want to live in Arizona now--imagine having to be there in the 1800’s, although it was pre-climate change.

80 minutes, in Technicolor. I saw it free on Moveland Tv.

Bones and All, Timothee Chalamet, cannibalism

I still don't like Timothee Chalamet for the way he stabbed Woody Allen in the back. He must want people to keep associating him with Armie Hammer. He's starring in a cannibal movie called Bones and All.

Owen Gleiberman in Variety contrasts it with vampire movies:

...the feedings aren’t sleekly suggestive the way they are in a vampire film. We see the characters ripping into bodies and munching away, the flesh coming off in chunks, the blood splattering everywhere. When they’re done with a meal, it will look like a serial killer was there. If that sounds a touch grotesque, it is; I found the scenes garish and unpleasant. Yet the ultimate reason they’re no fun to sit through is that cannibalism, in this movie, has no higher (or lower) meaning, no import beyond itself. It doesn’t signify anything … at all. The characters may, for a few moments, act like flesh-hungry zombies, but they’re not zombies. They’re meant to be sexy and sympathetic and relatable. How does watching them eat other people fit into that?

And this is based on a young adult novel.

From the director of Call Me By Your Name.

Cleverly opening in theaters Thanksgiving weekend.

The Extra Man (2010)

I got it on DVD from Netflix and watched it twice. I didn't like it the first time but that adjusted my expectations. I liked it on second viewing. 

Louis Ives (Paul Dano) moves to Manhattan after an embarrassing incident at the prep school where he taught English Lit. He sublets a room from aristocratic yet impoverished failed playwright Henry (Kevin Kline) who ushers him into the world of "extra men", men who act as escorts to wealthy women so there will be a more even mix of men and women at events. 

You might make it a double feature with Metropolitan (1990).

Things have changed since 2010. Today, Louis's vegan co-worker would have at least pretended to be less judgemental about cross-dressing. It's interesting that the transvestite is the straight man in this.

Based on a novel by Jonathan Ames. 

With Katie Holmes and John C. Reilly. 

It didn't make New York look that bad. You can share a run down apartment with a stranger for $350 a month, it wasn't hard getting a job and even parking an enormous 1970's American car wasn't a special problem.