It wasn't very good. Mrs Crane is married to a wealthy lawyer turned politician. She seems a bit distressed when a reporter asks her about her background. She's hiding her criminal past and she runs into her former boyfriend/accomplice when she and her husband go shopping for a mink coat. He's working as a salesman and is dating the woman modelling the coats. He tried to blackmail Mrs Crane so she kills him, but the poor model is charged with the crime and Mrs Crane is called up for jury duty. She's met the defendant and the victim and she knows the defense attorney, but all that is fine. She's made foreman of the jury.
I expected her to try to get the poor girl off, maybe breaking down and admitting in the end that she killed the guy. So it was refreshing that she was still a horrible person.
Interesting ending, I guess.
Low budget B movie. Directed by Sam Newfield under the name Sherman Scott. 60 minutes. Don't let the colorized lobby card fool you. It was black & white.
Adapted from a 1947 episode of The Whistler radio show.
We're in the same boat as the Russians to some degree. It took a long time for Woody Allen's last two movies to become available in the United States, and Roman Polanski's An Officer and a Spy still isn't available here. Even if you think Woody Allen was guilty of something, all his other films are freely available. Roman Polanski pled guilty but you can see everything else he's ever made.
The USSR had never part of the International Copyright Convention and after the break-up of the Soviet Union, people were freely translating American stuff. My brother was over there in the early '90's and has an unauthorized Russian translation of Bob Dylan's Tarantula.
I mentioned before that I briefly talked to a Russian kid online who wanted to learn English well enough that he could make unauthorized translations of American movies. Which was fine with me. I knew of Russians who were doing their own translations of American comic books----I don't mean Marvel or DC. They were translating things like Scrooge McDuck. One of them was a Brony, an adult male admirer of My Little Pony.
And someone suggested that China could retaliate against U.S. aggression by bootlegging Hollywood movies and making them freely available worldwide on their own version of Netflix.
There's a tendency in Eastern Europe to dub movies with only one voice. One person translates all the dialogue. I assume they have more conventional dubbing available. People prefer it to subtitles in any case, and it makes it easier to do your own translations.
In Mogadishu, some guys downloaded Blackhawk Down and charged people a few cents each to watch it on TV in a makeshift theater.
Dmitry Medvedev has allegedly called on Russians download movies that are unavailable there due to sanctions. I'm all for it. It may not even be a copyright violation. There was a company in the U.S. that distributed copies of movies that were otherwise unavailable here. I'm not sure I bought it, but they claimed there was a loophole in copyright law that allowed them to do it.
I remember long ago. Some Hollywood guy talked about the horrors of movie piracy. Why, before long, American movies would be no better soap operas!
I tried to imagine a world where movies looked like soap operas. It wasn't so bad.
Several years ago my sister thought we should all see The Interview, the anti-North Korean pro-assassination "comedy", as a patriotic act.
At least Medvedev was calling for people to download things they actually wanted to see. He wasn't suggesting they spend money then grit their teeth and force themselves to sit through crap they'd never go to otherwise.
Jeff Bridges, Andy Griffith, Alan Arkin, Donald Pleasence. Dub Taylor. It was nice to see Frank Cady (Sam Drucker from Green Acres) as Jeff Bridges' Pa.
I liked this movie when it came out. I don't remember if I saw it in a theater or on HBO or both, but I hadn't seen it in years. I came across it on DVD at the public library. It was interesting but not as good as I remember.
Jeff Bridges as a youth who wants to write western novels for a living. A correspondence school accepts him as a student. He travels there expecting to find a college campus, but it's just a post office box. The men running the scam try to rob him and he flees into the desert where he comes across a cheap western film being shot. He soon finds himself in the movie industry.
Part of a wave of movies at the time about Hollywood of the '20's and '30's which wasn't that many years earlier. Back then, I saw an old guy on TV---he would only have been in his 70's---talk about appearing in silent westerns as a teenager. He said the cowboys were nice guys. They were very protective of him, which may have just been their job if he was an actor and they were stuntmen.
Homelessness isn't really a thing in China. A young woman, a Chinese foreign student studying film in the U.S., starts filming a young fellow named Dylan who left his home and family and "chose" live on the streets. She saw this as a sign of vast freedom in America.
I don't know if she changed her mind after meeting Dylan's family. His parents were divorced, his father a perfectly nice man, a cop in Utah. It turned out that the young fellow had serious drug and psychiatric problems. He was paranoid schizophrenic. He also couldn't stand Utah or the Mormon church. When she met with Dylan again, he had written out the unkind things the voices in his head kept saying.
I hear this happens to everyone in a foreign country. You don't know what the norms are. I have ideas about life in China, but I assume I'm at least a bit off base.
Available 'til the end of the month on The Criterion Channel and free on a number of streaming channels.
Danish western set in the U.S. and filmed in South Africa. Mostly in English, but it had immigrants speaking Danish. It seems like a Danish movie made in Africa would have at least a few Black people in it. It had a slightly different look. They had what looked like a perfectly plausible 19th century passenger train, but it didn't look quite right.
Even Danish westerns have gotten incredibly violent. Starts with the murder of a Danish child and his mother. Naturally, the Danish father/husband wants revenge.
I guess that crazy advice they keep giving not to pull a gun on someone unless you're ready to shoot them is proven right in this case. Just shoot people. Holding them at bay is a recipe for disaster.
The deaths of the mother and child were unnecessary to the plot. The father kills the murderers a few minutes later, then he has to fight for his life when members of their gang come after him.
I just watched the violent but perfectly pleasant Amateur where we rejoice in the deaths of the criminals without having to watch anything really awful happen.
Isabelle Huppert plays an ex-nun trying to write pornographic fiction. She takes in a seemingly pleasant, well-dressed amnesiac (Michael Donovan) who has only Dutch coins in his pocket when he walks into a diner.
I'd never seen a Hal Hartley movie before. It wasn't what I expected. I guess I made cruel assumptions about him based on his bland, wholesome-sounding name.
An antidote to all the movies where accountants working for organized crime are hapless victims who don't know what's going on until it's too late and they're in over their heads. And it was refreshing to see the Dutch as the bad guys.
Featured on The Criterion Channel with other movies starring Huppert.
The cheap westerns they make now are incredibly violent. If you see a family on an isolated farm, you just know they'll be slaughtered.
Homestead started out looking about like all the others. There's a family in their little farmhouse. At least it wasn't in the desert. A stranger comes to their door.
But it was pretty good. A bit less violent. The best low budget western I've seen that had no horses.
Why do I keep watching these things?
Betsy Sligh, Brian Krause, Jamie Bernadette. A cast of ten. I guess I could name all of them. Dallas Page, Mike Furguson, Mike Markoff, Greg Kriek, Scot Scurlock, Cavan Tonascia, Mark Madeo.
I watched a little of the Oscars. I was touched by Ke Huy Quan's win for Best Supporting Actor although I haven't seen the movie.
I was dog sitting and my sister and brother-in-law arrived home a little after it began.
The Navalny "documentary" won.
Only one person in a group of winners gets to speak, but they often seem unaware of this. A second person will try to talk and they crank up the music to drive them away. It keeps things moving but it's painful to watch in a different way.
Paulie Go is a socially awkward boy genius who creates a robotic toy car with an advancement in artificial intelligence. He gets in a van and drives cross country to find a professor who rejected him.
The reclusive professor is somewhere in rural Minnesota. Paulie is picked up for driving his uncle's stolen van. His uncle won't press charges explaining on speaker phone how pitiful his poor nephew is and Paulie continues his search with the help of the sheriff's troubled daughter.
It looked like it'd be a pleasant movie, and it was, but it became a little more science fictiony than I expected.
If Paulie (Ethan Dizon) was a bit of a stereotype, Tracie Thoms plays a Black woman scientific genius and Madison Wolfe co-stars as a teen girl fisherman.
I saw this movie a couple of times when I was in high school. They kept showing it at the university. I didn't realize they filmed it at the local community college.
Elliott Gould plays a former campus radical Vietnam Veteran who returns to college to get his teaching credential. He's trying to graduate. His professors are mad at him and he's trying to focus on school rather than political activism. He rails against his girlfriend (Candice Bergen's) petit bourgeois tendencies while pursuing a teaching career himself.
Things were very different back then.
"Why, Harry? Why a teaching credential?" a friend asks.
"Money...money and power and little girls to molest!" he says. "It's a great life."
It was presumably a joke, but he shouted this on a crowded campus. And, come to think of it, he was teaching a freshman English class and sleeps with one of his students.
He calls his girlfriend a "dumb broad" at one point and there are a couple of anti-gay things. He was pretty stodgy for a radical.
He struggles to pay his $150 tuition, but that was over $1,000 in today's money. You could buy a ten-year-old car for $150 back then, but cars weren't built to last ten years in those days. Elliott Gould drives a 1958 Bel Air, only 12-years-old when this thing was filmed, but it was a hopeless wreck.
He probably wouldn't have been much of a teacher. He yells a lot and flies off the handle. If he had been a music major, it could have been a prequel to Mr Holland's Opus.
I'd watched old episodes of Dark Shadows on the streaming channel Pluto. It was an after-school soap opera from the late '60's. Came on at four o'clock. Kids would hurry home from school to watch. It was a little before my time. I wasn't old enough to get into it, but my sister had some friends who did and I learned recently that I have a cousin who loved it.
But it was a soap opera. A real soap opera on five days a week. Filmed live on tape. Every episode had a flubbed line here and there and sometimes the camera would pan too far and you could see past the edge of the set. But it was all dialogue, every scene a long conversation.
So I turned on the movie starring Johnny Depp. It was mostly a series of montages. I couldn't get into it. It had the same basic plot, but little in common with the original series.
Watched about half, turned it off and started Spencer, something about Princess Diana. But it was the same thing. There've been so many shows about her and the various royals. We know who they were and pretty much know what went on. But the movie was another trashy soap opera they tried to improve on by making it non-verbal.
It looked impressive, but I want to hear their conniving.
I thought it'd be comedic since it starred Bob Odenkirk, but it wasn't. Would any 58-year-old man do all that stuff even if he could? Very violent with implausible fight scenes that went on and on.
A few things in it were reminiscent of Breaking Bad. There's a Dodge Challenger, there are pallets stacked with bundles of money, there's a dangerous old man in a nursing home.
I'm not sure a guy pushing 60 would survive all those punches to the face. I wondered about that watching John Wayne's later movies--and he always smiled when people punched him. There was a woman in her 50's around here who decided to take up boxing. I guess she was in shape to do it, but she went into a coma after her first bout.
They were careful to make it clear that Bob Odenkirk did his own fight scenes.
Someone kindly shared their Netflix log in information with me. They've had Netflix for years and almost never watched it, so Netflix still comes out way ahead. They've canceled it but still have two weeks to go.
To be honest, I turned this thing on and haven't paid close attention to it. I don't think I missed anything. It's stuff we already knew or safely assumed. Look at those people! Would you marry into that family? Harry and Meghan were right to get out, but it shouldn't take six hours to say why.
It's like most reality TV, about rich people who don't deserve to be rich.
I have Episode One on as I write this. They're talking about their second date. They met at a restaurant. Harry thinks something is funny.
"You were late," Harry explains.
"I was late?"
"Yes. Remember?"
A moment of spontaneous levity.
I can't sympathize with Harry at all. He's a killer and always walked around wearing stupid-looking uniforms. He even wore one to his wedding. Meghan wore a big giant wedding dress. Had to have children help carry it.
We see them fleeing Canada in a private jet. They're going to California where they'll stay with a "friend" who's a rich guy they never met.
This happened in the 1980's or 1990's. The South Lane School District hired a Mormon as superintendent. The guy brought in a movie produced by Brigham Young "University" called "Johnny Lingo" he wanted all the kids to see. Set in some Polynesia-like island society where men buy their wives by trading cattle for women. The women take pride in being a "four cow wife"---that their husbands paid that many cows for them.
But there's a homely girl named Mahana who nobody likes. Her father wouldn't get very many cows for her! But Johnny Lingo comes to the village and wants to buy her.
"I am Mahana's father. What is it you want?"
"I wish to take Mahana for my wife," says Johnny Lingo.
"It is hard for a man to give his daughter to another."
"I am prepared to pay. How many cow do you wish for Mahana?"
"Three cows!" he says. Everyone laughs. Who would trade so many cows for Mahana!
Johnny Lingo holds up his hand to shut them up.
"Three cows is many. But not enough for Mahana. I will pay----EIGHT COWS!"
The natives are shocked. Why, it must be a joke.
He brings the cows. And he brings Mahana a mirror as a wedding present. She is now beautiful because Johnny Lingo paid eight cows. Self-esteem made her good-looking.
This, according to the title, is "Building self-worth in others".
My mother was the counselor in the grade school. She objected to the movie on a number of grounds, that it ends with Mahana feeling superior, not just equal to others and feeling that way only because some asshole overpaid for her.
The Mormon superintendent turned white with rage whenever anyone disagreed with him about anything. My mother's job was soon eliminated. She moved to teaching at the middle school. There, a boy said that he little sister was being abused by their Mormon stepfather. Their mother had died and they were living with an unrelated man.
My mother reported this to the principal. His sister had bruises from beatings.
"Only on the bottom!" said the woman principal, like that meant it was fine.
My mother mentioned this to the Mormon vice principal. He had only been a teacher for a year or two before the Mormon superintendent promoted him.
"We're going to let the church handle it," he said.
The church didn't "handle it".
At the end of one school day, the boy wasn't leaving. He was afraid to go home. My mother took him to the office. Instead of calling CPS, the principal let the kid look up the phone number and call them himself. My mother walked in as the kid was on the phone, not knowing what to say, so my mother took the phone and made the report.
The principal came out of her office was a aghast.
"I don't want you to be held responsible," she said.
They drove my mother out of her job within the year. I don't think she ever had any feelings one way or the other about the Mormons before then, but she did after that.
Filmed static camera in long takes. The movie intercuts between unrelated stories.
A bus driver stops at a roadside restaurant for the passengers to eat then refuses to go further until someone admits that they broke a curtain rod in the bathroom. No wonder his wife left him. A teacher witnesses a shop teacher abuse a child then listens to the others in the teachers lounge badmouth the kid and his mother. An old guy is seriously injured in a fireworks accident during a party and refuses to get medical help. Teen girls take vaguely salacious pictures of themselves and drink heavily. One is left passed out drunk while the others run away from an angry motorist. And there was a gay thing I didn't quite follow.
Don't be a Swede. Calling 911 is one of life's simple pleasures. You don't need permission to call paramedics. Report child abuse. If the schoolmarms turn on you, report them, too, if they give you half an excuse. I've never heard any teacher ever say anything nice or even neutral about any parent. This is apparently true even in Sweden. Calling for help is probably better than carrying an unconscious teenager to your car and driving off with her. Maybe he didn't have a cellphone.
