Jerry Springer

I only saw a couple episodes of his show. I don't think I watched them to the end. One was about a horrible woman who was retired so she started walking around naked in public. The owner of a laundromat was ordering her to leave but she argued with him and wouldn't go.

This contrasted weirdly with commercials for the show. Just a closeup of Springer speaking softly about how his German-Jewish parents fled the Nazis. 

Eunice & Mama

What can I tell you. I was watching a lot of episodes of the Carol Burnett Show, fast forwarding, trying to see just the Eunice & Mama skits. There were fewer than I thought. There was one I don't think I ever saw where Ed and Eunice are called down to the school. The teacher (Maggie Smith) tells them that their son is seriously disturbed, which made sense. Ed revealed himself to be a more abusive father than you'd imagine in a comedy-variety show.

    

I remember sitting in the living room watching the last of those skits back in the '70's. Eunice appears on The Gong Show. In the end, she's humiliated and the stage goes dark and it all goes quiet. Her image shrinks. Her dreams of success ruined.

"That was weird," my sister said.

I read that Carol Burnett's mother told her to become a writer, not an actress, because it didn't matter how writers looked.  So some of this may have hit close to home for her. Which makes it seem less cruel, a successful star playing a pitiful woman who desperately wishes she were one, too.

If Eunice were a real person and had been born in a different time, she might have been a YouTube star. Maybe she should have tried to perform locally. She might have had a pretty good novelty act.

Vicki Lawrence went on to star in the syndicated spin-off, Mama's Family. Maybe they could do another spin-off about Eunice's son, Bubba. He'd be in his 50's now, still dangerously disturbed, perhaps an alcoholic. Harvey Korman is gone, but Carol Burnett is still with us.

Tucker Carlson canned

Admirers of Fox "News" believe anything they say, except when they say they fired Tucker Carlson for sexism, antisemitism and harassment.

I guess there are a couple of other right-wing outlets Tucker Carlson could go to work for. He's sort of like that To Catch a Predator guy whose name I can't remember and won't bother looking up. He made a lot of money, but he ran it into the ground and rendered himself unemployable. It's a dead end. Fox News says they fired him with cause so they won't have to pay severance. There's a large amount of money involved, so, if he doesn't sue, it will be an admission of guilt and if he does sue, his shameful conduct will be detailed in the press.

Carlson used to be on CNN which is pretty shameful for them, but it shows he could have had a normal career. He once reported on George Bush, Jr, mocking a woman he executed as governor of Texas. Here's part of what he wrote in The National Review:

In the week before [Karla Faye Tucker’s] execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. “Did you meet with any of them?” I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. “No, I didn’t meet with any of them,” he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. “I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’ ” “What was her answer?” I wonder. “Please,” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “don’t kill me.” 

Charges dropped against Alec Baldwin

"Say! This gun isn't loaded with live ammunition, is it?" is not something I imagine any actor saying when handed a prop gun.

Prosecutors have dropped the charges against Alec Baldwin in the accidental shooting on the set of the movie Rust.

Roger Friedman on Showbiz411 writes:

After all that, 18 months, and now they say, Never mind.

The DA never had a criminal case against Baldwin, who never intended to shoot anyone. But redneck justice prevailed. Unbelievable. 

I'll mention this again. Several years ago, I heard a podcast with William Akers, a film prof at Vanderbilt University, who seemed quite angry that college kids didn't always use real guns in their student films. BB guns, airsoft or toy guns weren't good enough for him. It annoyed me at the time, but now it seems deranged. 

Invasion of the Girl Snatchers (1973)

The original title was The Hidan of Maukbeiangjow, which was meaningless as far as I could tell. Something about alien mind control.

I had seen a few minutes of this movie long ago. There was some sort of syndicated show called "The Movie Greats Network" which came on a local channel late at night and showed unwatchable movies they obviously paid almost nothing for. One was a shockingly racist South African movie.

They also showed this movie which seemed to be a comedy made in the South somewhere---in Arkansas, it turns out. I sat watching it in the middle of the night back then. It made me realize how easy it would be to make a disastrously unfunny comedy. 

Maybe film students should watch it for this reason.

There's a generation of film students who might think that the worst they could do is make a movie that's "so bad, it's good", oblivious to the potential for total failure.

I saw the movie on Tubi for the first time in forty years. It had more nudity than it did on 1980's broadcast television. I guess it says something for it that it's still available after half a century.

The Bravados (1958)

Gregory Peck as a rancher pursuing the gang that killed his wife. When they're arrested and awaiting execution for an unrelated crime, he heads to the town to witness the hanging, but the men escape and head for Mexico.

Written as an attack on McCarthyism, but it doesn't question the McCarthyites' sincerity or intentions.

In most westerns and American movies in general, each town has a single generic Protestant church everyone goes to. People are often very religious but have no specific beliefs. In this movie, everybody's a Catholic. The enormous church has a large boys choir played by Ninos Cantores de Morelia Chroral Group.  

Gregory Peck, Joan Collins, Lee Van Cleef, Henry Silva. Directed by Henry King.

My Old School, documentary

Documentary about a Scottish guy in his 30's who impersonates a teenager and goes back to his old high school. His classmates thought he looked about forty. They thought he was a teacher or an assistant and didn't understand why he was wearing a school uniform and sitting at a desk among the students. I guess they came to accept him. His knowledge of 1980's punk rock should have tipped them off.

I don't know how he liked high school the first time, but he said he hated it the second time. 

I think I'm giving away the ending:

It turned out that he graduated from high school, went to medical school, did well at first then flunked out. He applied to other medical schools but none would accept him, so he took another run at it. He would graduate from high school again, get into medical school again under another name and see how it went. 

Some of the kids benefitted from his being there. They got to study with a 30-year-old genius which got them into college and into pretty good careers.

The movie doesn't show the man today. They had an actor who looked vaguely like him who lip-synched the interviews they did with him. There were live interviews with his former classmates, mixed with animation. Toward the end, they showed video and still photos of the guy in high school, performing in the school play and so forth. 

You have to have some flexibility. Instead of going to ridiculous lengths to achieve your goal, find a different goal. Is being a doctor really that great? 

Available on Hulu.

The Alpha Caper (1973)

A made-for-TV movie written by Sherwood Schwartz's brother, Elroy. I'm surprised Henry Fonda's career had reached the point that he'd appear in something like this.

Fonda plays a 61-year-old parole officer who's forced to retire after forty years on the job. 

He bravely walks into a warehouse from which Noah Beery, Jr, was shooting it out with police. Beery is mortally wounded but strangely cheerful. Convicts love their parole officers. 

It turns out Beery was planning a big armored car robbery so Henry Fonda takes over as his gang's leader. He tells them that his long career as a parole officer means he knows how to avoid the mistakes that get people sent to prison. Contrast this with the line from Body Heat. One of William Hurt's former clients reminds him what he once said to him:

"Are you ready to hear something? I want you to see if this sounds familiar: any time you try a decent crime, you got fifty ways you're gonna fuck up. If you think of twenty-five of them, then you're a genius - and you ain't no genius. You remember who told me that?"

With Leonard Nimoy, Larry Hagman, James McEachin, Vic Tayback and James Sikking. 

It wasn't very good. Made for TV movies were made to fill a two hour time slot, so they were longer than theatrical films but cheaper and not as good.

And, since it's TV, you already know that there'll be limited violence and that they'll get caught in the end.

Available on this odd streaming channel called Movieland Tv.

Brooke Shields doc on Hulu

I don't know what year this was, but, in high school, I was sitting next to a friend and he started telling me about a magazine article he read, apparently about Brooke Shields. I never heard of her and didn't believe a word he said. I told him there was no such thing as a "child sex symbol" and if there were such a thing, it would be illegal. And I told him that no one would ever make a movie about a child prostitute because no one would want to see it.

But I also remember seeing Brooke Shields on The Tonight Show promoting Pretty Baby. I didn't know what they were talking about, but she didn't understand the controversy around the movie at all. I didn't connect that to what my friend was talking about.

A couple of years later, I was vaguely aware of who she was but didn't understand the Brooke Shields phenomenon. Her fans seemed to be teenage girls, but how did THEY know who she was? She was known mainly for a couple of R-rated movies.

There's a new two-part documentary about her on Hulu.

I don't know what stood out to me about it. I never saw Endless Love.  The director, Franco Zeffireli who came under attack recently for the nude scenes in his 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet, sounded like kind of a jerk. 

Shields going to Princeton didn't impress me since all teen stars go to elite colleges. How many of them have gone to Harvard? James Franco destroyed the illusion by enrolling in several universities at the same time and the dullard George W. Bush went to Yale.

Woody Allen's Coup de Chance, short review by Roger Friedman on Showbiz411

Roger Friedman has seen Woody Allen's new movie, Coup de Chance, shot in France, in French with a French cast, and writes this on Showbiz411:

...The irony is that after a long and legendary career as a humorist and wordsmith, Woody could wind up with an Oscar for Best International Feature.

The 90 minute film, shot by the great Vittorio Storaro, is one of Woody’s best. I can’t say it’s a murder mystery, exactly, but it’s the story of a murder that takes place outside of Paris. Woody is 86 years old. The screenplay is as sharp as “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which he made 34 years ago. It also has a surprise twist that no one who sees it can give away. The movie ends with a gasp.

...

I watched this film with a few people who I think were in distribution. I can tell you the air in the room was filled with suspense. I was on the edge of my seat worrying about certain characters. And yes, there is humor. If you pay attention, Woody throws in some lines that lighten up the mood.

The Killers (USSR, 1956) Tarkovsky et al

Straight telling of Hemingway's short story. A student film with three directors, Andrei Tarkovsky, Marika Beiku and Aleksandr Gordon. 

The murderers seemed a little young, but they didn't extrapolate on the story like the Lee Marvin-Angie Dickinson version.

21 minutes. 

Available on the Criterion Channel.