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| "The year's sexiest cannibal love story." --Variety |
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
+ 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.
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| Say! He IS sexy! |
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.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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
