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.

Air Force One (1997)

Imagine the reaction if anything like this had been made in Russia or any other country the U.S. doesn't like, portraying their president as an invincible Ubermensch. Putin would have been a far more plausible action hero than any of the physical wrecks we've had as president, but in one scene we see the White House staff gush that the president (Harrison Ford) is a Medal of Honor recipient and was in Vietnam.

I might have liked this thing if it had been about a Nixon-like president---a guy about sixty who nobody likes, paranoid and self-pitying, a former Navy file clerk with something to prove; someone who gave up golf because it required too much coordination, who recorded everything said in the Oval Office because he couldn't be taught how to pause a tape recorder---who has to overcome or at least work around his deficiencies to physically triumph when the presidential jet is hijacked. It would have had more of a character arc.

Irwin Allen's Towering Inferno (1974)

I remember seeing this on TV but I couldn’t have paid much attention. I would have remembered Mike Lookinland (TV’s Bobby Brady) in his most dramatic role. Hero architect Paul Newman carries him out of a burning apartment and leads him, his mother and sister to relative safety. I think he did his own stunts. 

Maybe it was what the script called for, but Lookinland smiles when he learns the children will be evacuated first. I think I would have concealed my glee at leaving the wealthy grown-ups to their fates. But his ordeal wasn't over yet.

Also starring Steve McQueen, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Dabney Coleman, Jennifer Jones, Richard Chamberlain, Robert Wagner and O.J. Simpson among others.

 

Two hours forty-five minutes. Free on Moviland.Tv.

Roar! (1981) Tippi Hedren, Milanie Griffith

Remember Tippi Hedren bellyaching about Alfred Hitchcock's cruelty, having birds attack her during the filming of The Birds? That was 1963. Thirteen years later, she and her "husband", Noel Marshall, started filming this nightmare.

It was hard to pay attention to the plot, but, according to IMDb, "A naturalist living with big cats in East Africa expects a visit by his family of four from Chicago. A mix-up leaves him searching for his family, who have been left in the clutches of wild lions."

They gathered together dozens of animals, mostly lions, untrained and untamed walking around loose, with cast and crew wandering around among them.

"This was probably one of the most dangerous films that Hollywood has ever seen," Tippi enthused. "It's amazing no one was killed." 

Tippi's daughter, Melanie Griffith, was mauled and had her face torn open. They thought she was going to lose an eye. Didn't bother Tippi who thought reconstructive surgery was a normal part of film production.

Since it was filmed in California, I don't know where they got the zebra that the lions ate. 

Noel Marshall was attacked repeatedly and got gangrene. Took him years to recover. Tippi was bitten in the head. That bloody scene was left in the movie. The DP had to have his scalp sewn back on.

All this and more for a movie that couldn't possibly have turned out any good.

Watching it was less traumatic than I thought it would be. Got it on DVD from Netflix.

You might recall that Jodie Foster was mauled by a lion while making the Disney movie Napoleon and Samantha and the bear once sat on Clint Howard on the set of Gentle Ben. At least the victims of Roar! were adults.

How did they get insurance?

The movie was listed as a comedy and was rated PG, but a YouTube video compilation is age restricted:

https://youtu.be/jqz7rPflvvE

Independent's Day (1998)

About the Sundance Film Festival and the even more independent Slamdance Film Festival.

What stood out to me was a shop owner in Park City, Utah, telling about how pushy and demanding the "filmmakers" were, how self-important they were when they were really nobody.

And you kind of got that impression from the rest of the movie, although it wasn't the fault of the filmmakers they interviewed. They were asked to talk about their lives and work and how do you do that without sounding self-absorbed?

They interview Steven Soderbergh and (very briefly) Bryan Singer and several others.

With Sydney Pollack and Roger Ebert as voices of reason.

54 minutes. Available on the Criterion Channel.