Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945)

Dana Andrews as an oddly well-dressed drifter who finds himself in a small town. He marries a wealthy girl for her money so he can dump her, take half her money and marry the girl he's really after. A degenerate in love. Another movie made during World War Two with no mention of World War Two. It might have ruined it if it did. Is COVID-19 a thing in movies and TV shows now?

Alice Faye and Linda Darnell. With John Carradine as an itinerate spiritualist and Percy Kilbride, cinema's Pa Kettle, as Pop.

Maybe film students should be like Sam Bankman-Fried

With all that money, he could have done anything.

They make it sound so easy. I read an article somewhere saying that other youthful "Effective Altruism" believers have gone into fields where they could make as much money as possible.

I have two brothers who are jazz musicians. Somewhere, one of their friends, noting some of their other friends, said that a spouse with a lucrative career was the musician's best bet.
 

Maybe going into a field where you can embezzle billions before you're 30 would be the best way to fund your absurdly expensive filmmaking hobby.

How many people become movie directors by studying to be movie directors? Most of them seem to go into it by way of some other career. Actors, musicians, stuntmen. I know of one animal wrangler. Bigfoot researcher, comedian, novelist, screenwriter. I heard of a law student in the South who bought an old movie theater in a small town for almost nothing, then made a movie so he'd have something to show. There was a school principal who made educational films. Evangelicals. Anti-Communists. 911 truthers. Guy who thought Michael Jackson was innocent. Newspaper columnist. 

What's the best field to go into if you want to parlay it into movie directing?

Something someone else wrote about Harry and Meghan which I haven't seen

I read this and, for a minute, I really wanted to see it:

Netflix’s Harry and Meghan has been billed as a documentary, but it is clear that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have never watched that form of the genre.  Hardly surprising: Prince Harry is unworldly and semi-literate and Meghan can hardly count herself as a cerebral giant. Indulgent, narcissistic and manipulative, the Prince and his Hollywood companion have done a spectacular job of undermining any reserves of sympathy they might have had in their freezing out from the Windsor universe.

Much has and will be made of the various personal details the Netflix production is promoting.  The dominant theme is blame and blamelessness, enriched by a layering of score-settling.  Unaware by the implications of her own conduct, Meghan herself observes that, “Most people need to find someone to blame.”

The couple are, naturally, clean, washed, pristine; the laundry of everybody else, from the media to the ghastly relatives, is not.  “I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the (Daily) Mail did.  I watched the whole thing,” states a forlorn Harry.

Read the whole thing here.

After watching some of the former rich kids in the 7 Up series and reading attacks on Prince Charles, I realized that I approved of self-pity in the British upper crust. The poor devils get no sympathy from anyone else.

But this thing just sounds like Reality TV, about rich people who don't deserve to be rich.

War of the Gargantuas (1966)

Like a more serious Godzilla movie because much of it took place at night. And it was better. Less cartoonish, although it was pretty much the same thing. Two giant ugly ape men fight in a Japanese city. With Russ Tamblyn as an expat scientist. Ikio Sawamura, the town officer from Yojimbo, appears briefly.

Post Avatar Depression

Avatar never interested me, but now I see articles about something called Post Avatar Depression Syndrome. A shocking number of people who see the movie become despondent.

“Ever since I went to see Avatar I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them,” one wrote. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in Avatar.”

I almost want to watch the movie just to see if I'm made of tougher stuff than these Avatar fans, but I checked Roku. The movie has brought in nearly $3 billion but they're so greedy they still won't let you see it for free. 

I don't know if there've been any Avatar-related suicides. People started disappearing off cruise ships after Titantic, presumably while trying to climb out on the prow so they could yell that they were king of the world. How many people have James Cameron movies killed?

Sam Bankman-Fried arrested

His parents had been with him for a month in the Bahamas. There are some articles online saying that his parents will be financially ruined paying his legal fees. They're supposedly a progressive family, but their two sons have devoted their lives to grubbing for money. The other one is a stockbroker. And the parents are happy with this.

The Bankman-Fried clan's belief in "Effective Altruism" led to their self-destruction. It's an excuse for being a grotesquely rich, completely unproductive parasite. This is what admiration for George Soros has wrought. That guy is a currency trader. What a humanitarian.

Professors Bankman and Fried correctly accepted the Marxist critique of capitalist society but were too bourgeois to accept the Marxist solution of working class political action. "Effective Altruism" is the opposite of that, the belief that only the super-rich are qualified to mold society. 

If Bankman and Fried were Communists, they would be financially unthreatened. Their sons would be decent people. Communists in capitalist countries are like Calvinists. They live modestly. Because of that they have extra money which they tend to put into rental property which isn't a problem in Marxism. 

Maybe this will be a good thing for them. They've announced their retirement. Once they squander their wealth trying to keep their son out of prison, they can live on Social Security. Move into a camper and do some traveling before settling down somewhere, maybe moving in with their other son if he would have them, if he's not too bitter after years of being the less successful brother even though he's the  good one who stayed out of prison.

Sam gave them a $16 million Bahamian vacation home. How could the other one ever compete with that?

Taylor Swift to direct

Searchlight Pictures announced that Taylor Swift will direct a movie based on her own script. 

“Taylor is a once in a generation artist and storyteller. It is a genuine joy and privilege to collaborate with her as she embarks on this exciting and new creative journey.”

They won't say, but it will probably be about a guy she dated briefly and now hates.

Serge Gainsbourg directed movies, some deeply disturbing. John Lennon directed some music videos. Neil Young, Frank Zappa---they were directors. Barbra Streisand, of course. Show business is show business, apparently. In this state, we had an animal wrangler turn movie director.

Anything Else (Woody Allen, 2003)

Woody Allen plays a dangerously neurotic Christ figure. Danny De Vito is healed after coming in contact with him and Allen sacrifices himself in a way so that Jason Biggs can achieve happiness and grow as a human being. 

Jason Biggs as a struggling young comedy writer who has befriended sixtyish struggling comedy writer Woody Allen. Biggs is shacked with his bad girlfriend (Christina Ricci) whose mother (Stockard Channing) moves in with them.

This and Hannah and Her Sisters are the only two Woody Allen movies I've seen which involve the purchase of a rifle, but he's made so many he may have done this in others I haven't seen.

It was all dialogue. Quentin Tarantino said it was one of his 20 favorite movies made since 1992. I watched it because critics tended not to like it and it failed at the box office. Leonard Maltin rated it a "BOMB". I would tend to agree to Tarantino, though. I thought it was one of Allen's more enjoyable movies. 

Sam Bankman-Fried's mother's "flash fiction"

Her obviously guilty "son".

Barbara Fried, the Stanford law professor mother of disgraced crypto-currency ex-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, was the author of "flash fiction", very short fiction. It's easy to write and easy to read, at least in theory. 

I don't know if her stories offer insight into what's wrong with her horrible son. In one, she fantasizes about being the mother of a dead son. Another is about a mother and child who turn out not to be related, another about an elderly mother with no memory of ever having a child. There's a little bit of a pattern there.

Here's a link to one of Fried's award-winning stories:

https://losangelesreview.org/henry-barbara-fried/ 

At the end of the story is information about the author:

Barbara Fried’s short stories have appeared, among other places, in Bellevue Literary Review, Subtropics, Guernica, and Word Riot. Her story “The Half-Life of Nat Glickstein” was chosen as a Distinguished Story of 2013 by the editors of Best American Short Stories. Other of her stories have received recognition, including finalist in the Bellevue Literary Review’s 2013 Fiction Contest, top 25 in Glimmertrain’s 2014 Very Short Fiction contest, long list in Fish’s 2014-15 Short Story Contest, and semi-finalist in New Millennium’s 2011 Fiction contest.

In her day job, she is a law professor at Stanford University, in which capacity she has written widely on political and moral theory for academic and general audiences.

Here's another:

https://law.stanford.edu/index.php?webauth-document=publication/441932/doc/slspublic/Really%20by%20Barbara%20Fried%20Word%20Riot.pdf

And another:

https://walleahpress.com.au/communion1-Barbara_Fried.html

Here's a page with some links to her other stories and poems:

https://www.bhfried.com/page2

Writing is a popular pastime in prison, something certain members of the Bankman-Fried clan might keep in mind. Sam is walking around free in the Bahamas and says he's down to his last hundred thousand dollars, like we're supposed to feel sorry for him. More than enough to go on the lam. Are there still back alley plastic surgeons?

Cold Turkey (1971) directed by Norman Lear

Norman Lear said that he considered episodes of his TV shows to be one act plays. This movie, made before his first TV series, was the opposite of that. There were short dialogue scenes, but it was pretty much a big montage of a town where everyone agrees to stop smoking for one month to win $25 million from a cigarette company.

P.R. guy Bob Newhart convinces an extremely old cigarette company owner that he would be like Alfred Nobel, remembered for the Nobel Peace Prize which never interfered in his munitions business. It'd be impossible for an entire town to stop smoking anyway.

Dick Van Dyke as the minister in what seems to be the only church in a declining town of four thousand people who leads them to stop smoking so they can win the money. He played a nice guy, but not that nice. 

People smoked way more back then. I was always slightly shocked as a kid---you'd occasionally walk past the Teachers Lounge, the door would open and they'd all be in there with cigarettes dangling from their lips. One or two would eat lunch in the cafeteria alone, surrounded by students, because the Teachers Lunchroom was so thick with smoke. Back then, if you had a one pack a day habit, you were a light smoker.

Full of actors who went on to appear in Normal Lear's shows. Jean Stapleton and Vincent Gardenia from All in the Family, Graham Jarvis from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Paul Benedict from The Jeffersons. With Bernard Hughes, Tom Poston, and Judith Lowery as an elderly foul-mouthed anti-Communist.

With Bob and Ray in multiple roles as reporters and interviewers.   

I haven't seen this since the '70's when they'd show it on network TV.

Music by Randy Newman. Robert Downey Sr was a second unit director.

 

The Third Man (1949)

I heard an interview a few years ago with now-former critic A.S. Hamrah promoting The Earth Dies Streaming, a collection of his reviews. He talked about a contemporary review of The Third Man by Manny Farber in The Nation magazine, and, I don't know, I guess this was some sort of revelation to him, reading a review written before the movie attained its current status. Farber was more critical than people writing about it today would be.

I watched the movie again on the Criterion Channel. It was brilliant. I don't care what this Manny Farber person thought. Who the hell was Manny Farber?

I didn't like the anti-Communism. They were in Vienna, a hopelessly corrupt city full of murderous "former" Nazis, and we were supposed to worry that Valli might have to live in Czechoslovakia. She would have been better off in a socialist country. In Vienna, she dated a monster who horribly victimized a large number of children for profit. She knew what he did and still thought he was dreamy.

Gun Girls (1957)

Not as good as you'd expect. I found it weird that it was based on a novel. It didn't seem like something that needed a literary source.

About juvenile delinquents of indeterminate age. They commit a number of violent robberies. In an opening scene, we see one hit a man over the head after another girl lured him into an alleyway. They sell stolen property to a fence (Timothy Farrell) and buy a couple of guns from him. Most of the action takes place in Timothy Farrell's one room apartment.

“I understand now! With a gun, you’re somebody.”

In one scene, the two girls gather their stolen loot.

“Remember the sucker we conked in the alley that night?”

“I’ll never forget it. You know, I was sure scared. It was the first time I ever lured a man in an alley.”

“I’m hip. But there’s a first time for everything, honey.”

One of them says, “Come on. Let’s change clothing and get out of here.”

Starring Eve Brent who went on to have a pretty good career as a supporting actor, with Timothy Farrell,  former silent film actor Harry Keatan and Barbara Weeks, all of whom appeared in movies that were directed and/or written by Ed Wood. One of Brent's last roles was in an episode of Community.

The film wasn't amusing. Sort of interesting how little you could do in a movie back then and still have it be commercially viable.

A little creativity wouldn't have cost anything. There was a Japanese juvenile delinquency movie where two girls from rival gangs fight at night in the dark, each with a flashlight in one hand and a switchblade in the other.  In another, Japanese high school girls attempt to murder a classmate by having her blood slowly drip into a vat used in science class. They learned in health class how much blood you have to lose for it to kill you, so they tell the poor girl that when it gets to a certain level she'll die. 

But, for Gun Girls, I guess they needed to at least pretend to have some seriousness of purpose. It starts with a Dragnet-like narration and has a scene where a girl's parole officer berates her parents for the lousy job they've done.

67 minutes. Free on Tubi.