Lady in the Lake (1947)

It's all in subjective shot, seen through the eyes of Philip Marlowe as he tries to find a missing woman. We never see him except when he looks in a mirror. I suppose it made it hard for them to edit scenes since everything's a continuous shot, the camera moving slowly. Sometimes his hand comes into the frame. The gimmick just didn't work very well. It didn't make it realistic. Robert Montgomery's performance, mostly voice-over, was one-note.

A Christmas Noir on the Criterion Channel. The story begins a couple of days before the holiday and ends Xmas morning.

I liked the Southern gigolo. But the whole thing was people looking directly into the camera as they talk to the detective. In one scene, he stares at a closed door as he talks on the phone. The bits of violence don't work very well.

Robert Mongomery, Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan.

An hour and forty-five minutes.

Rear Window (1954)

This was one of several movies that Hitchcock owned the rights to. He pulled them from circulation to increase their value for his daughter. They were re-released in 1984, each playing for one week at a local theater. I dragged a friend kicking and screaming to see them. I think Rear Window was the first one we saw, and he shut up after that. 

How many movies have imitated Rear Window? Does this mean it's dying from over-exposure or that it's still obscure enough that they think they can steal from it and no one will notice? The Simpsons did a spoof of it.

This is why you should watch movies alone. If you're with a group, you have to make a safe pick everyone will enjoy and you'll get tired of any objectively good movie. 

I just watched it again last night. My brother's in town and he turned it on. 

"Frank Cady's in it," I said watching the opening credits. He was Sam Drucker in Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. He was the guy sleeping on the fire escape with his wife which I would consider a stunt.

Greg Brady's lip in the UFO episode

One time a movie director went ballistic when Steve McQueen arrived on location riding a motorcycle. The slightest mishap on that thing would delay or halt production and cost them millions. 

Well, I'm sitting here in the middle of the night watching The Brady Bunch, the episode where Bobby and Peter keep seeing a UFO. 

What's that on Greg's lip, I wondered.

I googled it. It was a common question. They said he cut himself shaving in the episode, but Barry Williams had been in a minor car accident. Not everyone wore seatbelts back then. He had this little bandage on his lip.

In the early seventies, my family got a car with a buzzer that would go off until you put on your seatbelt. People would pull the seat belt out just far enough that the buzzer would stop and sit there holding it to spare themselves the indignity of actually fastening it.

The episode where Marcia gets hit in the face with a football was reportedly written because she injured her nose in a car accident.

I don't have a point here. I was going to ponder what the best course of action would be if one of the kids on the show was unable to continue.. Should they bring in another kid who looked like him like the new Darrin on Bewitched? On My Three Sons, they wrote one off the show and adopted another one. 

Murder by Contract (1958)

A really annoying existentialist hitman travels to California to murder the witness against an organized crime boss. At one point, I thought it would be one of those honor-among-murderers thing. He's outraged when he learns he's supposed to kill a woman, but it's because he thinks he should have been paid extra because women are "unpredictable".

There's no one to get behind in this thing. He only has two weeks before the trial starts, but he spends day after day just hanging around. He wants to go to the beach. The two guys there to assist him are getting panicky. The woman is under guard by police at her house. The hitman finally comes up with an elaborate plan to murder her.

He later decides the job is "jinxed" and refuses to go forward.

Directed by Irving Lerner. Starring Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine and Herschel Bernardi.

Martin Scorsese said it was the movie that had the greatest influence on him, but he also called it a "guilty pleasure":

...there’s a getting-in-shape sequence that’s very much like the one in Taxi Driver. The spirit of Murder By Contract has a lot to do with Taxi Driver. Lerner was an artist who knew how to do things in shorthand, like Bresson and Godard. The film puts us all to shame with its economy of style, especially in the barber-shop murder at the beginning. Vince Edwards gives a marvelous performance as the killer who couldn’t murder a woman....

Reportedly filmed in seven days. 

81 minutes. Free on Tubi.

Ryan O'Neal dead at 82

Ryan O'Neal has died at 82.

The things that stand out to me was the time he punched his teenage son, Griffin, in the face knocking his teeth out because he had developed a drug problem. This was reported in the press at the time but nothing happened to him. O'Neal first forced Griffin to snort cocaine when he was eleven. He was later arrested for trying to shoot him. And there was the time he hit on his daughter, Tatum, at Farrah Fawcett's funeral.

A horrible person who should have died 60 years ago.

Norman Lear, RIP

Norman Lear died December 5th at age 101. Created shows like All in the Family and several spin-offs and spin-offs of spin-offs such as Maude, The Jeffersons and Good Times. I didn't know it until years later, but Diff'rent Strokes and Facts of Life were his work, too. His shows had their own extended universes.

Even as a ten-year-old, I didn't understand why a supposedly radical or at least liberal show like All in the Family was so anti-working class. The audience would laugh whenever Archie mentioned that he was in World War Two and I would strain to see the joke. Why was a radical like Meathead so dismissive of the war against fascism? Now I find it strange that four adults live together and the only one with a job was the bad guy.

Here are the words of Richard Nixon himself on All in the Family:

“Archie is sitting here with his hippie son-in-law, married to the screwball daughter. The son-in-law apparently goes both ways. This guy enters. He’s obviously queer, wears an ascot, but not offensively so. Very clever. Uses nice language. Shows pictures of his trip and all the rest. And so then Arch goes down to the bar. Sees his best friend, who for two years used to play professional football as a linebacker…God, he’s handsome virile, strong, this and that. And then the fairy comes into the bar…”

I know the episode he was talking about. I guess it's nice that Nixon watched. I had Republican grandparents who liked the show, not because they were rooting for Archie but they were amused by Meathead's frustration with him.

I wish they'd show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman again somewhere. 

Street Girls (1975)

Couldn't find a good picture from movie, but here's where
one scene was filmed, although it was snowing
in the movie.

Maybe that's what the place was like in the early '70's.

I came across a rather seedy movie on Tubi, released in 1975, called Street Girls. A father comes to Eugene, Oregon, looking for his daughter who had gone away to college. He didn't know that she had become a stripper and a prostitute.

The father goes to a strip club and loves it. I thought the scene would end with him realizing that the girl he was leering at was his daughter, but no such luck.

I didn't know we had strippers and prostitutes here back then, but I was 12 or 13. How would I have known.

The movie was made during the urban renewal craze, so there were buildings that had been torn down and not yet replaced. They mentioned the Smeede Hotel which was an office building at that point, one of the few old buildings they didn't bulldoze. They really wrecked downtown. 

Made three years before Animal House which made the town look so much better.

The script was co-written by Barry Levinson who was assistant director. It wasn't a regional film. Made for $35 thousand, about $200 thousand today.

A lot of nudity, prostitution, drug use and human trafficking. 

Teen-age Strangler (West Virginia, 1964)

"What kind of nut would do something like this?" says an ambulance driver taking away one of the victims.

A triumph of regional cinema. It was shown theatrically into the 1970's. 

A strangler is murdering high school girls in Huntington, West Virginia, and misunderstood Jimmy (Bill Bloom) is the prime suspect. Teenagers aren't entirely cooperative with police because they're trying to conceal their drag racing and forbidden love.

Jimmy's younger brother Mikey (John Humphries) steals the show. It was his first time acting and only movie. He was teary and guilt-stricken because his big brother took the blame for his stealing a bicycle which set Jimmy on his downward spiral. Jimmy tells him to stop his sniffling and a cop tells him to calm down at one point. I thought they should mother him.

61 minutes. Tubi has it in both its original form and the MST3k version.

Monster on Campus (1958)

You know the coelacanth, the prehistoric fish believed to have been extinct for 66 million years? It turned out that fishermen on the east coast of Africa caught them all the time. 

A specimen arrives frozen at a university. The frat-boy (Troy Donahue) bringing it there warns that it's starting to thaw. His German shepherd starts lapping up the water from the melting fish and turns vicious. His teeth appear longer like one of his prehistoric ancestors. Later, a dragonfly comes in an open window, lands on the fish and turns into a giant prehistoric dragonfly. And the professor (Arthur Franz) cuts his hand on the fish's teeth and----well, you can guess what starts happening. Like an early, less pretentious version of Altered States. They find the prof lying unconscious near the body of a co-ed hanging from a tree by her hair.

It was the opposite of Food of the Gods where people want to destroy the giant animals and pretend they never existed. In this, the professor is shocked by the giant dragonfly but wants to capture it for science.

With Joanna Moore the same year she appeared as Marcia Lennekar in A Touch of Evil. 

Well-made but not scary or especially gruesome. From Universal Pictures. 

Directed by Jack Arnold who directed Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man. He also directed 26 episodes of Gilligan's Island and 15 episodes of The Brady Bunch.  A surprising career arc. 

Free on Tubi.

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Another 1980's slasher movie. This one deeply offended Roger Ebert in part because one of the victims was a middle-aged woman. He only wanted to see YOUNG women killed. You really have to be careful what you're outraged by. 

There's town where there had been a serial killer twenty years earlier who left a warning that they must NEVER HAVE ANOTHER VALENTINE'S DAY DANCE. They decide twenty years was long enough, so they arrange such a dance, but people start being killed so they cancel it. Police are then alarmed that some people arranged their own big Valentine's Day party. 

Some of the ladies want to see the coal mine, so the coal miners sneak them in, go down a thousand feet into the mine. That's where the final showdown takes place.

It didn't especially like it. They put more work into it than they had to. I think Roger Ebert painted himself into a corner with his outrage at the genre; he just had to be outraged at a this movie when it wasn't that upsetting. Maybe it was a different time. Maybe I'm some kind of monster who doesn't know when to be offended. I hope it's not the COVID talking.

There was a 2009 remake, reportedly in 3D.

Free on Pluto.

The Devil's Mistress (horror, western 1965)

Four men on horseback and trying to hurry through Apache territory on the run from the law. One is especially distressed at the thought of being hanged. Some others can't stop laughing as they talk about raping and murdering Indian women. One is a nice guy who thinks they're kidding. They're out of food, haven't eaten in days. They spot a stone building and go there hoping to find food. 

A couple lives there, a man with a deep voice who has a beard and no mustache. The young woman living with him is mute. He explains that they fled Salem years earlier to escape religious persecution and finally found their way there.

One of them questions where the food came from. They aren't growing vegetables and they don't have any animals and the house obviously hasn't been lived in in years.

It was interesting. Only 66 minutes long, filmed on weekends, according to IMDb. For most of the cast, this was their only credit although one guy had been in other things.

Seemed to be dubbed which would make sense, but I've been fooled before. Almost every scene was outdoors. 

I didn't like the close-ups of those guys eating.

Just looking at the title, you can guess where it was going. The plot was a little thin but working in a subplot might have been a challenge. Obviously low budget, but I rather liked it.

Free on Tubi.

Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

It was a murder mystery. No crazy Columbo- or Monk-like murder methods. Mostly a matter of figuring out who had what motive. The detective keeps asking people whether they were in love with one person or another. It was great, but I couldn't see any deeper meaning.

As with other movies, I was disturbed by the implied nudity, in this case Clifton Webb sitting in a bathtub carrying on a conversation with detective Dana Andrews. 

Perhaps a noir alternative to Design for Living. Laura (Gene Tierney) works in advertising and is apparently successful. She has a lavishly decorated apartment in the city with a large portrait of herself over the fireplace, a household servant and she owns a house in the country. She's obviously rich but she doesn't come across as a businesswoman. And two or three men are fighting over her.

Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933)

The thing that came as a surprise to me was Edward Everett Horton in a supporting role. He had a distinctive voice and even though I hadn't seen it in years I realized he was the narrator of "Fractured Fairy Tales" on the old Bullwinkle Show. Thinking back, I remember his name being on there although it meant nothing to me until now.

A struggling American playwright (Fredric March) and a struggling American painter (Gary Cooper) are friends living in Paris and are both in love with a commercial artist (Miriam Hopkins).  When the two men discover they were each pursuing the same girl, the three of them agree to live together as friends. She will help guide their careers. And "No sex," she tells them, which she could say because it was Pre-Code, but it didn't last.

They were sophisticated creatives. And they were fictional characters which gives them certain advantages. 

Written by Ben Hecht based on a play by Noel Coward. 

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Bert I. Gordon's Food of the Gods (1976)

Marjoe Gortner wasn't plausible as a football player, especially not as a genius football player who knows exactly what to do to defeat the giant rats. 

An elderly couple (Ida Lupino and John MacLiam) have discovered the Food of the Gods bubbling up from the ground. It was sort of white, but they thought it was oil. When they realized it wasn't oil, they fed it to the chickens and it turned them giant. 

Starts with a guy being attacked by giant wasps. He dies a horrble death. Marjoe runs to get help, finds a house and is attacked by a giant chicken. He stays focused and runs to the house and asks to use the phone, but they don't have one.  

It ends up with Marjoe and John Cypher returning to the island. They blow up the giant wasps nest. But there's also a pregnant young woman and her husband whose Winnebago has gotten stuck and Ralph Meeker and Pamela Franklin and rushing to the house to buy the Food of the Gods from the old couple.

One of these movies where people take it upon themselves to destroy a miracle of nature because their initial brush with it doesn't go well. Wouldn't all this stuff be of some scientific interest? Couldn't it be a boon to mankind?

The Winnebago appears to be a Tonka toy and I assume the Volkswagen was, too. In fairness, they used Star Wars toys as miniatures after the first Star Wars movie, too.

I don't know how much suffering they inflicted on the poor rats in this movie. I didn't see the Humane Society thing assuring us that no animals were harmed. 

I hadn't seen this thing since the '70's. I didn't think much of it back then but after Empire of the Ants made just a year later, I thought I should give it another shot.

It's not his fault, but I can't stand Marjoe Gortner.  

Empire of the Ants (1977)

People gather on an island where developer Joan Collins is trying to sell plots of land. Turns out the place is infested with giant ants.

Much better than I expected. Directed by Bert I. Gordon twelve years after Village of the Giants and a year after Food of the Gods. He liked making movies about giant animals. 

I don't want to give anything away, but I was reminded of the words of Kent Brockman:

"I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."

Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961)

Gidget was kind of a brat. She throws a tantrum because her parents surprise her with news that they're all going to Hawaii! Her boyfriend, Moondoggie, is home on vacation from law school in the east and she doesn't want to leave while he's back. Moondoggie, a frat-boy, tells her she should go because surfing in Hawaii is great, so she stomps off in a huff, goes home and tells her parents she'll go after all. Her father (Carl Reiner) sees how terribly unhappy she is without Moondoggie, so he pays for him to come to Hawaii, too, but she's already stolen another girl's boyfriend. We're supposed to side with Gidget because the other girl can't swim.

I assumed it was all filmed in California and part of it was, but they also used locations in Hawaii and New Zealand.

Free on Tubi. 

Train to Tombstone (1950)

Kind of Stagecoach-like. A number of train passengers heading for Tombstone. There's a prostitute, a clergyman, a corset salesman, a pregnant woman and her mother who complains about the corset salesman, perhaps mistaking him for a transvestite. And a gunslinger whose guns are taken away when he boards the train in motion.

I guess someone's getting ready to rob the train. It's carrying $250,000 for some reason.

They keep getting attacked by Apaches  or criminals disguised as Apaches.

On Pub-D-Hub. Maybe other public domain streaming channels.

Not great, but it was only 57 minutes.

I'm sitting here watching it after testing positive for Covid. Wear your masks!

Mesa of Lost Women (1953)

I liked the model airplane. One of the engines quits and it crashes on the Mesa in question.

They got good use out of models back then. Look at Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes or the cabin on the snow-covered mountain in W.C. Fields' The Fatal Glass of Beer.

It wasn't that terrible. Arty in its way. With former child star and one-time lynch mob participant Jackie Coogan as a mad scientist. He creates giant spiders he controls psychically, then starts churning out spider women.

With Ed Wood regulars Mona McKinnon, Delores Fuller and narrator Lyle Talbot. With 2' 11" actor Angelo Rossitto (Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome). 

Free on Tubi. They also have the Rifftrax version.

70 minutes.  

Had this guitar music playing constantly which got really annoying. 

The Duellists (1977)

Ridley Scott's first movie after a career directing TV commercials. Based on a story by Joseph Conrad which was based on real events. A deranged officer (Harvey Keitel) in Napoleonic France insists on fighting repeated duels with another French Army officer (Kieth Carradine).

Back then, if you were an army officer and you refused to fight a duel when challenged, you'd be forced to resign your commission. I don't know if they'd kick you out of the Army completely. If they did, it'd get you out of the Napoleonic Wars which would be a good thing obviously. At one point, the two guys are with the Army fleeing Russia as winter sets in.

The movie looked great. Filmed entirely in existing locations. 

This movie was playing at the university here when I was in high school. There was a line of people in front of the classroom where it was showing. I asked someone what was playing. He told me and said it was a great movie if you like fencing. I was into kung fu movies at the time and thought maybe this would be a new martial art I would enjoy watching people kill each other with, but I passed on it. I felt guilty for not sharing that poor guy's enthusiasm for fencing, but I don't think I would have liked it at that stage.

It was interesting. They used some of the same stupid-looking but apparently authentic techniques they did in Royal Flash.   

It also had a sword fight where the guys got really tired and were staggering around struggling to lift their swords.

Gore Vidal worked on the script to Ben Hur. In that story, a Roman gets into a thirty second argument with Ben Hur and spends the next twenty years persecuting him and his family. Vidal had to add a gay backstory for it to make any sense. But this movie made that sort of thing seem plausible. Harvey Keitel spends decades trying to kill Kieth Carradine.

They only fight six duels in the movie. In real life, the French guys fought thirty duels in twenty years.

Free on Pluto.

Baywatch

Pluto has a Baywatch channel now. I still haven't sat through a full episode. It wasn't very good.

Long ago, I saw an  episode of a show, maybe Entertainment Tonight, which had a story on one of the producers of Baywatch. The reporter was weirdly impressed that the guy had written the script to an episode. The producer was dismissive. A script is made up of three minute scenes, he said. "I can write a three minute scene."

Now that I've seen it, writing an episode doesn't seem impressive at all. If you can't think of what to do next, just cut to a montage or rescue a swimmer in distress.

It's an even bigger mystery to me why this thing was so popular in Europe.

Prom Night (Canada, 1980)

Slasher movie. Probably not a lot you can say about it. Violently bratty kids play a form of hide & seek in an abandoned school. They gang up on a girl who falls out a window to her death. 

Six years later, it's Prom Night! 

This had a couple of plot twists, I guess. A relatively innocent sex offender was wrongly accused of the crime and hospitalized, but now he's escaped. The former children receive threatening phone calls.

It goes for an hour before the slashing begins. The prom has a disco theme, so there are dance sequences that drag on. Jaimie Lee Curtis was a trained dancer so she's the John Travolta of her high school.

Something about a ruffian taking the prom king crown from the rightful winner. The masked slasher goes around doing what you expect him to do.

Eve Plumb, TV's Jan Brady, was reportedly set to star until Jaimie Lee Curtis cruelly stole the role from her. I would have loved seeing a slasher movie with Eve Plumb.

With Canadian star Leslie Nielson. Some sex. More smoking than you'd probably see now. They reportedly had to beef up the violence to avoid a PG rating. 

I didn't watch slasher movies in the '80's, but the few I've now seen weren't that bad. I'm sure I've said this before. There weren't that many people killed compared to some movies, and because they focused on random or somewhat or seemingly random murders, the non-murder scenes were relaxed laid back. They weren't straining to create an intricate, logical plot. 

Available on The Criterion Channel, but I don't imagine it'll be there very long.

Airport 1975 (1974)

Wasn't up to the standards of the first. There was hardly any adultery, just Charleton Heston and Karen Black. I assume their relationship was adulterous. I wasn't paying close attention. 

I wondered how Myrna Loy felt about Gloria Swanson playing herself with people gushing over how good she looked at 75. Swanson wrote her own lines. Myrna Loy was just five years younger and played an aging alcoholic, perhaps a callback to her role in The Thin Man films.

With Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller, Conrad Janis, Helen Reddy, Erik Estrada, Larry Storch and Sid Ceasar, Large Marge (Alice Nunn) from Peewee's Big Adventure, Sharon Gless from Cagney and Lacey. Linda Blair as a girl being rushed to get a kidney transplant; played much the same sickly sweet character she did in early scenes of The Exorcist. Former Roger Corman regular Beverly Garland just three years after her role as Fred MacMurray's second wife on My Three Sons.

Dana Andrews flying a small plane crashes into a 747. Everybody is sucked out of the cockpit except pilot Efrem Zimbalist, Jr, but he was hit in the face and is blinded so plucky stewardess Karen Black takes charge.

George Kennedy plays the same character he did in the original Airport although he's had a promotion. Susan Clark from Webster and Brain Morrison, the grandson from Maude, play his wife and son on the flight. 

Free on Tubi.

It was huge in its day. If you haven't seen it, it will explain some of the jokes in Airplane! 

I don't think I'm spoiling anything, but these movies have surprisingly low death tolls considering everything.

Airport (1970)

I watched this in a theater when I was seven or eight. The MPAA rating system was very different in those days. The movie was rated G in spite of Dean Martin talking with a stewardess about flying to Sweden for an abortion. And there was the bomb of course. The first in a wave of big disaster movies with all-star casts.

Jean Seberg looking very conservative as the airline's head customer relations agent who is sleeping with married airport manager Burt Lancaster.

The movie is surprisingly pro-divorce. Van Heflin plays a down-on-his-luck demolitions expert and psychiatric outpatient. He's going to kill himself and blow up a plane full of people so his absurdly devoted wife (Maureen Stapleton) can collect on his flight insurance. Before he leaves for the airport, she tells him that she married him for better or worse implying she would never leave him, thinking she was such a good wife when she was actually driving him to an early grave and endangering scores of airline passengers. More explicitly, Burt Lancaster and his wife (Dana Wynter) agree to end their marriage for the sake of the children. Dean Martin's wife (Barbara Hale) knows her husband is a swinger but thinks if she sweats it out long enough, he'll stop doing that and come back to her. She sees him walk right past her in the end heading for the hospital with his injured pregnant stewardess girlfriend. 

Helen Hayes as a cute old lady who sneaks onto planes without a ticket. I always took the old women Robert Hayes sits next to in Airplane! to be a reference to her.

It looked like a movie from 1970, everything nicely lit, realistic but not enough to fool anyone. Do they make big movie soap operas anymore?

Free on Tubi.

The Quick and the Dead (1995)

I've written about this before, but the most violent play I ever watched was one written and performed by the first and second grade classes at my school. A king wants to find a husband for his daughter, so he has all the potential suitors fight to the death. The last one left alive will marry her. Most of the kids played the men fighting to the death, others were given the task of dragging the corpses off stage. I was a little surprised that the kindly old teachers let them do it, but it's not that easy writing a play with roles for forty or fifty children.

It was like this movie. Gunslingers come to a town run by Gene Hackman for a big contest, murdering each other in the street. The winner is supposed to get a vast amount of money, and Hackman arranged the whole thing to kill off his enemies. 

I'd heard of the movie but knew nothing about it and never had any interest in it. It's on the Criterion Channel along with other westerns that focus on women characters. I was surprised it was directed by Sam Raimi. 

There were Samurai movies where Samurai would fight duels and kill each other for no reason, just to show that they could. I hated those.

And I don't like ubermenschen. I just want a movie about regular people with normal human abilities who murder each other for some logical reason. 

But it was better than I'm making it out to be. Stole the ending from Once Upon a Time in the West.

Starring Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio back when he was cute, Russell Crowe. With Pat Hingle and Woody Strode.

Bankman-Fried convicted

That was fast. The wretch was convicted of all seven charges. Jury deliberated for four and a half hours. There are more charges he'll be tried for in March, apparently. 

Well, good luck to him in prison. Maybe he can teach math. Poor devil.

From an article in The New Yorker from September. The reporter talked with Bankman-Fried's mother, Barbara Fried:

I asked whether she had ever felt compelled to ask her son if he’d done any of the things he’d been charged with. She replied no—she didn’t need to ask. Her son was incapable of dishonesty or stealing, she said. “Sam will never speak an untruth,” she went on. “It’s just not in him.”

I am reminded of the words of comedian Andy Kindler when he was the judge on Kids Court.

"Kids!" he said, "You've got to work on your lying!" 

Sam Bankman-Fried grew up without ever learning that people may not believe him whether he's lying or not. It may explain why he was blathering away in interviews long before the trial. He said in one that his lawyers were pleading with him to shut up.

Defense rests in Bankman-Fried trial

The defense has rested in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial. He was the only defense witness.

According to The Washington Post:

In his own retelling, he only learned that his hedge fund, Alameda Research, had spent $8 billion in customer deposits from his crypto trading platform, FTX, by overhearing a conversation among his employees in September 2022. He said when he confronted them, he was told to stop asking questions and that they were busy.

Tomorrow there will be closing arguments then the jury will deliberate and render its verdict. Guess what it's going to be!

Not Quite Hollywood (documentary, 2008)

Until the 1970's, Australia had the strictest movie censorship in the western world. I guess it's in the western world. When censorship was finally lifted, they started churning out very seedy, violent, sex movies. I don't know what it tells you. Either Australians NEEDED censoring, or they were kept in a state of childlike innocence so long that they didn't know how to handle their newfound freedom.

Or maybe the crap they made was of great artistic merit. Quentin Tarantino seemed to think so.

Australia made perfectly nice movies, too.

An Australian girl in my high school gave a presentation to the class about her country and a boy asked about something he saw in an Australian movie, a scene with sweaty girls in a classroom doing breathing exercises. She said, no, they don't do that. He was talking about the movie Walkabout.

Focuses only on Australian exploitation films. It didn't make me want to watch any of them. I usually find movies about foreign national cinema interesting, but this got dreary. 

Available on Pluto.

Fantastic Journey (TV pilot, 1977)

Something possessed me to watch this on Tubi. I had watched the show some in the '70's. It was on less than one season, ten episodes. It was a little strange that child actor Ike Eisenmann, then 13, was its big star. Was probably a wise move since child actors are more affordable. Roddy McDowell joined the cast later.

Researchers enter the Bermuda Triangle. One brought along his tween son. They're attacked by a big green cloud and find themselves shipwrecked on an island. In each episode, they pass through time portals into different periods in the future. 

It was pretty cheap which might have been less of a problem if it hadn't dragged on for two hours. Even in the '70's it bothered me that people from the future had 1970's hairstyles. 

The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960) Jack Lemmon, Ricky Nelson

I had seen this on TV a few times when I was a kid in the early '70's. I knew who Jack Lemmon was but didn't recognize Ricky Nelson. I must have been drawn to it by the title and the cartoony opening credits. It was like a Disney version of The Caine Mutiny. Jack Lemmon as a bad Navy captain. He had been a yachtsman in civilian life, so the Navy puts him in command of a small sailing ship during World War Two. The crew doesn't know what it's doing. Turns out they're on a secret mission no one was told about. It wasn't really funny and it becomes a war drama toward the end. Based at least loosely on a true story.

There was a wave of these movies---Operation Petticoat, Father Goose, Mr. Roberts among others. 

Ricky Nelson has a song. With Alvy Moore from Green Acres; The Six Million Dollar Man's Richard Anderson appears briefly. There's a Japanese officer who speaks perfect English because he went to college in Ohio.

It did turn me off to any thought I might have had as a child about joining the military. They can just order you to do something and you have to do it, like climbing the mast and even "funny" officers were rotten people.

Free on Tubi.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Saw something on YouTube about embarrassing things young people write in college admission essays. A girl trying to get into film school said she developed a deep love of cinema after watching Paul Blart: Mall Cop. I'd never seen the movie. It didn't interest me, but there it was, free on Pluto. 

From Columbia Pictures. Adam Sandler's production company was behind it. Starts out as a Marty thing about a lonely mall security guard (Kevin James) living with his mother and daughter (Raini Rodriguez). 

Pretty well-made. Nothing wrong with it technically. It got terrible reviews but made a fortune at the box office. A young person seeing it and deciding to go into film made more sense than Steven Spielberg watching Lawrence of Arabia and thinking he could do better. 

I never understood what was funny about Segways. 

Romney tells Biden to take longer steps

Mitt Romney reportedly told Biden that he looks old when he shuffles. I found this surprising coming from him. Several years ago, and I posted this years ago, an elderly relative pointed out how Romney minces around.

"I've never seen a man walk that way," she said. 

Someone may have told Romney to stop doing it which could be why he was conscious of it watching Biden. In fact, the other kids may have pointed this out to him in high school which was why he started physically attacking kids he imagined were gay. He had something to prove.

Apparently Romney and Biden are friends now. It shouldn't be surprising. Biden is in the extreme right-wing of the Democratic Party and Romney hates Trump.

Sam Bankman-Fried parents

In 1990, Charles Keating, Jr, a devout Catholic and anti-porn crusader, was convicted of defrauding  customers of Lincoln Savings & Loan. He stole $250 million selling junk bonds he claimed were low risk. Mother Theresa sent a letter asking the judge for leniency. Keating had donated money to her. The prosecutor in the case wrote to Mother Theresa, explained Keating's crimes and asked that she return the stolen money he gave her. 

Part of the letter said:

My experience has been with the ‘con’ man and the perpetrator of the fraud. It is not uncommon for ‘con’ men to be generous with family, friends and charities. Perhaps they believe that their generosity will purchase love, respect or forgiveness. However, the time when the purchase of ‘indulgences’ was an acceptable method of seeking forgiveness died with the Reformation. No church, no charity, no organization should allow itself to be used as salve for the conscience of the criminal.

It was kind of him to suggest Keating had a conscience.

So what about Sam Bankman-Fried's parents? They're being sued by FTX for the return of the stolen money their son gave them. 

It seems like putting up the money for their son's legal defense violates everything they pretend to believe. The father claimed to be a utilitarian, in doing whatever will help the largest number of people, and they believed in "Effective Altruism", throwing their money around where it will do the greatest good, yet they're spending millions of dollars trying to keep a single obviously guilty psychopath out of prison. 

They spent $50,000 a year sending their son to an elite private school. And he had a brother and sister so they may have been squandering $150,000 a year on that when public education was free for the taking.

"That's what money's for," the father said about their big flabby son's legal defense, trying to make it sound like money meant nothing to them, like they hadn't greedily lapped up millions in stolen customer funds.

It's different seeing an entire bourgeois family wrapped up in a massive criminal enterprise. Bankman-Fried's brother and sister were involved in it, too. And the parents still try to pass themselves off as moral paragons. Are they now grappling with this blow to their self-image, or were they consciously trying to conceal their true selves all along?

The Old Dark House (1932)

I can't imagine going to a strange house in the middle of the night and asking if I could stay there until the weather improved, but the movie made this seem perfectly plausible. Driving in a rain storm in a 1920's convertible looked terrible. There were no windows on the sides and the road wasn't paved or marked and the headlights weren't that good. And the couple's wise-cracking friend in the backseat wouldn't shut up.

It may have been less plausible that the eccentric old brother and sister who lived there employed a hulking mute butler (Boris Karloff) who turns violent and attacks women when drunk. They mention the family members locked in rooms upstairs. 

For the first 50 minutes, it was more social awkwardness than horror. They're eat dinner. An obnoxious couple comes to the door and burst in without being invited. They hang around and hang around. One of the women goes to a bedroom to change her clothes, leaves the window wide open with wind and rain blowing in and doesn't tell anyone. They're not good guests. 

There's a nice scene of one of the women who starts doing shadow puppets. They stole that scene in cheap slasher film, set in the U.S. but filmed in New Zealand. I can't remember the title or why I turned it on.

Things start to go wrong in the last 20 minutes.

Available on The Criterion Channel and on Tubi.

Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably (France, 1977)

Cute long-haired French youth walks around thinking about suicide. I'm not giving anything away. The opening shot is newspaper headlines saying he killed himself. Another headline says that the "suicide" was murder.

Like Bresson's other movies with actors delivering their lines unemotionally. It worked quite well. More directors should give it a shot. It called attention to itself when he says "He told me off," to describe a calm, lifeless conversation he had earlier.

France always looks like a hell hole in the movies. In this, a cop knees the young fellow in the back while he's being questioned by police.

Released the same time as Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit.

Available on The Criterion Channel. 

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

I read the short story this was based on in junior high school. There was also an episode of Gilligan's Island based on the story. I assume this means that EVERYONE reads this in junior high. Like "The Monkey's Paw", "The Gift of the Magi" and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery". Everyone must have read them or they wouldn't be used as references on The Simpsons.

Although, I wonder now if there are literary references they keep showing that I always miss, like there's some story everyone else read in school while I was skipping class.

A David O. Selznik production, so it was beautifully shot and stuck closely to the story. Filmed on sets later used in King Kong with some of the same cast. 

Joel McCrea and Fay Wray are shipwrecked on an island and find a rich guy living there, an avid hunter who had gotten bored shooting stupid animals. Hunting wasn't intellectual enough. He wanted to hunt a high IQ animal of some kind.

On the Criterion Channel for Halloween.

Come to think of it, when I was a kid, I saw this on PBS which showed Criterion collection movies in the afternoons. 

"Who is Killing Cinema?"

Something I watched on YouTube. Some if it I was aware of. I mentioned the lack of new movie stars on here, although I read about it online---it wasn't a personal observation. But I was fine with Netflix killing off Blockbuster and Hollywood Video after those two chains wiped out local video stores. I haven't been to a movie in years. I was critical of Woody Allen for not wanting to make movies unless they were shown in theaters. I thought he and Spielberg were devoted to the "theatrical experience" because they got a cut of the gross, and that's probably true. I don't believe either one of them has been to a movie in decades.

I had a friend whose aunt was a film writer. His aunt and uncle went to some event in New York and sat in a theater right behind Steven Spielberg, 

"I could have hit him over the head and killed him," his uncle said.

So, yeah, I wouldn't go to movies either if I were him.

But I only have a two streaming channels I pay for, I don't watch made-for-streaming movies except for that Prince Harry thing, I don't watch superhero or Pixar movies, or Star Wars.  

The guy was only talking about Hollywood and didn't go into the effect any of this might have on the rest of the world. It could be a boon to mankind. And if it's not, would it really be that awful?

From The Onion

Yes, I know it's not real, and I don't know what it says about changing attitudes in the U.S., but The Onion's satire really surprises me sometimes.

'New York Times' Issues Apology For Reporting Palestinian Deaths

NEW YORK—Claiming that the humanizing of occupied peoples is not what the newspaper stands for, The New York Times issued an apology Tuesday for reporting on Palestinian deaths. “Our thoughtful and accurate coverage of the Palestinian death toll in no way met our editorial standards for obfuscation, and for that we sincerely apologize,” said executive editor Joseph Kahn, explaining that the article marked the first such mention of Palestinian suffering in the Times’ 172-year history, and it would certainly be the last. “Rest assured, the individual responsible for bringing to light the atrocities perpetrated on the Palestinian people has already been terminated. We will use this as a teachable moment and redouble our efforts to conceal the anguish of all marginalized and oppressed peoples going forward.” At press time, the Times issued a retraction for incorrectly identifying Palestinians as “human beings.”

Stupid young man, Monstrous old woman

As far as I know, Justin Bieber had tutors but hasn't been to school since the 6th grade. He apparently got this from the ghastly Hillsong megachurch he's part of. The dullard posted a picture of the destruction Israel inflicted on Gaza and announced he was praying for Israel for some reason:

Jaimie Lee Curtis, meanwhile, posted a photo of terrified Palestinian children looking up at incoming Israeli missiles. Put a little Israeli flag at the end. She was either showing her support for the murder of Palestinian children or she thought they were Israeli. Or both. People pointed out that the children in the picture were Palestinian and Curtis took the post down.
 

The photographer posted on her Instagram page wrote "Palestinian famlies seek refuge with their children from the Northern Gaza Strip to UNRWA schools inside Gaza City." They're right to be afraid. Israelis have already bombed the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza and they have a history of targeting schools.  

13 West Street (1962)

Alan Ladd as a rocket scientist. He's attacked one night by a group of bourgeois juvenile delinquents driving a pretty good car. They check his ID as he lies unconscious and they begin threatening him and his wife. 

Rod Steiger as a police sergeant trying to find the assailants. 

Alan Ladd's penultimate film. He was forty-eight and hadn't aged well, poor devil. Although, in fairness, the "teenagers" were no spring chickens either.

Ladd put more effort than most people would have into finding the hooligans who attacked him, and the kids stayed fixated on him as well. Since they were obviously rich, they could have given Ladd the added motivation of wanting to sue the crap out of their parents.

With Bernie Hamilton in a small role.

Free on Tubi.

Burt Balaban's Mad Dog Coll (1961)

Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll was an Irish-born mobster in New York.who became big in the late 1920's and early '30's. The movie didn't follow the true story that closely. In real life, Coll murdered one child, a five-year-old. In the movie he kills two pre-teens. 

The actor playing Coll, 26-year-old John Chandler, had kind of Steve Buscemi feel to him. With a young Jerry Orbach who kept the same hairstyle the rest of his career. Telly Savalas as a police detective.

Directed by Bob Balaban's cousin, Burt. 

Kind of a middling gangster movie. Went lighter on the submachine guns than some.

Free on Tubi.

The Strange Dr. Weird

I had to google it. It turns out that Weird is an actual surname of Scottish origin.

It was a twelve minute radio show, 1944 to 1945. Dr Weird lives in a house by the cemetery. He invites us in and tells us another story. Each episode also has a cheery commercial for men's hats, so the story itself is pretty short, but you know where each episode is going so there's no point dragging it out.

In one episode, a couple, desperate for cash, go to visit the husband's only living relative, a wealthy recluse living in a swamp where he says he's protected by his "friends", the snakes and alligators. The old timer leaves them alone in his shack, they find his money box and murder him when he returns, but they're eaten by alligators as they try to get back. 

It was interesting to listen to a show that required so little apparent effort, but that might have been deceiving. Even the title seemed lazy, although it did capture the flavor of the program.

They were shortened versions of stories from a half hour anthology series called The Mysterious Traveler.

I don't know what else to tell you.

You can download it here:

https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Strange_Dr_Weird_Singles 

 

Murders in the Zoo (1933)

One of the pre-code horror movies featured on The Criterion Channel. I wondered if it really qualified as a horror movie. It was about a jealous husband who murders any man he thinks is interested in his wife, but I watched the opening scene, and, okay, it was a horror movie. A rather shocking image even by modern standards. 

Randolf Scott was the only actor I recognized.

A big budget Universal horror movie, just over an hour long. It had lions, poisonous snakes, a big giant boa constrictor. A woman eaten by alligators. Just over an hour long.

 

Thirteen Women (1932)

An astrologer sends twelve women letters warning them that their horoscopes predict someone will die because of something they did, that they'll kill someone else or will kill themselves. They turn out to be self-fulfilling prophecies.

One of the women was a trapeze artist. She reads the letter just before going out to perform. It was disturbing to watch. 

The astrologer is under the spell of the thirteenth woman, an old classmate out to get even. You have to have to admire that to one degree or another.

A lovely movie. Well made. An early David O. Selznick production. One of the pre-code horror movies featured on The Criterion Channel for Halloween. They have a 59 minute version. Originally 73 minutes. Fast moving. They only have five minutes to kill each one, although a couple are just newspaper headlines.

With Irene Dunne, Ricardo Cortez.

I'll give away one thing from the ending: It turns out that the killer had been abused in school by her "victims" because she was mixed race. The movie was sympathetic to her which is interesting coming from the producer of Gone With the Wind.

Netflix quits DVDs

Netflix has given up on the DVD business. It's all streaming now. I had signed up for their cheapest DVD plan, could get one at a time. Got an email from them telling me not to bother sending their DVD back. It's all over which is kind of too bad. Streaming video probably causes more environmental damage.

I've written this before. Blockbuster and Hollywood video had killed off the local video stores. The local stores were more interesting. There was one that specialized in high brow and foreign films, one rented out nothing but crap---cheap horror movies or not-very-good westerns. I was able to rent spaghetti westerns there that I heard about but couldn't find anyplace else.

The big chains had a lot of copies of popular titles and a limited selection of everything else and I assume Netflix would be like them only more so. 

But I was at work one day. I mentioned a movie to co-worker. I couldn't remember the title, but it was about a wealthy woman in France who was in love with a chimpanzee. He wandered off to a computer, checked Netflix, came back and told me it was Max, Mon Amour.

I signed up. Saw movies I read about but had never seen and stuff I'd known nothing about. It turned out there was something called "nunsploitation", exploitation films about Catholic nuns. Watched some very good Japanese gangster and juvenile delinquency movies, the films of Luis Bunuel, Soviet films, post-Soviet Russian films, cheap exploitation films. I couldn't get enough of them.

Now what do I do?