Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Tom Cruise is surprisingly plausible playing a doctor. He flashes his medical license like a cop showing his badge. I avoid anything with him in it, but it was free on TUBI and would only be there two more days, so I clicked on it.

Very different than I thought it would be. Tom Cruise is mad that his wife thought about sleeping with a sailor, so he sneaks into what turns out to be a satanic sex club for rich people. They don't want their activities found out so it becomes a paranoid thriller, everything taking place in just a day or so.

The women were a lot more naked than the men which seemed old fashioned. 

I read that it was based on an old novella by a Jewish doctor in Vienna. The scene where Tom Cruise is jeered by homophobic frat boys was an anti-Semitic incident in the book. 

Endless Love (1981)

I never saw it, never had any curiosity about it. Maybe I would have if I had known how odd it was. It was on DVD in the public library and I recently watched the Brooke Shields doc on Hulu. so I checked it out.

I knew it was about a teen who sets his girlfriend's house on fire when he's not allowed to see her anymore. Strictly speaking, he could see her at school. He just couldn't have sex with her in her parents' living room.

I assumed the fire setting was a physical manifestation of his burning adolescent passion. It turned out to be a George Costanza-like plan to put out the fire so he'd look like a hero and could start sleeping with his 15-year-old girlfriend again. And it turned out that this happened at the halfway mark in the movie. It goes on for another hour after that. He was a high school senior, I suppose an 18-year-old, so he was facing 20 years for arson, but the judge kindly sent him to a mental hospital. 

There was a line in it early on. Brooke Shields' brother tells the boyfriend, David, that just because he's sleeping with his sister, it doesn't mean he's a member of their family. David wants to be part of their Bohemian family. His relationship wasn't incestuous, but he wished it were. The mother is a writer and the father, even though he's a doctor, plays the trumpet with a band they hired to play in their living room for some reason.

So there's this semi-incestuous thing. The mother is dangerously open-minded. She gets up in the night, looks downstairs, sees David violating her daughter in the living room and smiles approvingly. It turns out she has a thing for the young fellow herself. 

The father later sees David naked in his daughter's bedroom. She's wrapped in a sheet and goes in and shuts the door. Instead of chasing him out of his house, the father complains to his wife. Says that a girl like her shouldn't go with the first guy she meets, like he thinks she's hot. 

As an MD, shouldn't he have noticed David's mental health issues?

Is it just me or are documentaries really slow now?

I saw an interview somewhere with Morley Safer from 60 Minutes. He was asked if he ever watched his old shows, and he did. He said it bothered him that they were so slow---he kept wishing they would get to the point. And there was a video of a Today Show report on The Sex Pistols or some such group coming to America that seemed much longer than necessary.

I felt that way watching that Prince Harry documentary on Netflix and the Brooke Shields thing on Hulu. They just dragged on and on and on. Blah blah blah blah blah.

I started watching some other documentaries on Hulu. I don't remember what they were, but I distinctly remember getting bored. I hit pause and saw that the thing dragged on for almost an hour and half. I had quite a ways to go before they would presumably get to the point, so I turned it off.

I don't know if I'm wrong or if the people of television are wrong. It's something you can look stupid complaining about.

Return of the Witch (Finland, 1952)

I liked Larry Buchanan's movie The Naked Witch. It was an hour long, ostensibly a horror movie but really a disappointing nudie film. It was produced by a Texas drive-in theater owner and cost about the same as a new Cadillac at the time to make. A young fellow in Texas impulsively digs up the grave of a witch who had been burned at the stake by German immigrants in the 1840's. He pulls out a stake that had been driven through her heart and the witch comes back to life. Her body is reconstituted but her clothes aren't so lucky. She walks around naked looking for descendants of the jerk who got her killed.

It's not clear when it was made or released, but the copyright date was 1961.

It turns out there is a 1952 Finnish movie, The Return of the Witch aka The Witch, available free on Tubi with a similar plot. Archeologists pull the stake out of a mummified witch and she comes back to life, sort of. They find a woman lying naked in the empty grave.

Black and white, much better-made than The Naked Witch. The setting is more interesting. The nudity was more impressive but the film does drag on a little. It was released in the United States. 

If you scour microfilm of Texas newspapers at the time, my guess that you'll find the 1952 film played at Claude Alexander's drive-ins. 

I was wrong: De-aging IS necessary

I read a few years ago that one reason Europeans make so many movies in English was that Europe doesn't have enough movie stars any more. They need monolingual Hollywood celebrities to star in their movies so everything has to be in English.

Now the U.S. has the same problem. American stars have gotten old and there's no one to replace them. 

From an article in Variety:

“Over the last 10 years, we’ve done a really shitty job of creating a new generation of movie stars,” groused one sales agent.

And a look at some of the projects on offer or premiering at Cannes seems to bolster that argument. There’s “Breakout,” an action-thriller featuring 75-year old Arnold Schwarzenegger that will be directed by “Expendables 4” filmmaker Scott Waugh; “Lords of War” with 59-year old Nicolas Cage returning to a role as an amoral arms dealer that he first played nearly two decades ago; “That’s Amore,” a rom-com with a 69-year old John Travolta; and “The Rivals of Amziah King,” a crime story featuring a 53-year old Matthew McConaughey. In most cases, these actors have been famous, globally so, since the 1970s or ’80s (McConaughey, a relatively newbie, had to wait until 1996’s “A Time to Kill” to make his mark).

 

Read the whole thing here.

According to one guy they quoted, Hollywood stopped "being able to reliably make movie stars" when the DVD market collapsed in 2008.

“Nearly all of the actors and actresses who are [bankable] now had very successful films when DVD and video was still a huge force,” said Hamilton, who is selling several films at the festival including Polly Findlay’s debut feature “Midwinter Break,” starring Lesley Manville (“Phantom Thread”) and Ciarán Hinds (“Belfast”). “You could see that as a dividing line shift in terms of older or newer generation. With the new generation, there’s more divisions between success because you could have the most-watched show or film on a streamer. But there might be a whole swath of society who might not subscribe, and they’re not part of that.”

 

Maybe this is why Hollywood still clings to violent recidivist criminals Shia LaBeouf and Ezra Miller. The South African guy who was going to use a computer generated James Dean in a movie may not have been so dumb after all.

 

I don't mention them here, but the article mentions a couple of female stars, by the way.

Margot at the Wedding (2007, Noah Baumbach)

I don't know how much movies like this really lose. It cost $10 million and grossed $2.9 million dollars worldwide. I assume they made a lot from home video. Because there are a lot of movies like this that cost several million but might gross less than a million in theaters.

Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her thirteen-year-old, Claude (Zane Pais), travel to attend her sister, Pauline's (Jennifer Jason Leigh's), wedding. She's marrying Jack Black playing a failed musician turned failed painter.

Margot and Pauline haven't spoken in years. It looks like they're going to get along, but, you'll see.

Early on, they play an awkward, symbolic game of croquet. They're all just terrible at it. 

Nichole Kidman had a stunt double. There was a nightmarish scene of her climbing a really tall tree. 

There were critics who thought the characters were too unlikable. I didn't notice it. I thought the kid, Claude, was the main character since he was the focus of the opening sequence on the train. It was hard to tell, but he probably had more of a character arc than the others.

Is de-aging necessary?

There must be somebody out there who looks like a young Harrison Ford. If he can't act or doesn't sound right, just have Harrison Ford dub his lines.

Or explain somewhere in the movie that Indiana Jones has always suffered from body dysmorphia that gives him a distorted image of his appearance and this is why he looks different in his own flashbacks.

Look at Laurence Olivier in old age, killing people in Marathon Man, getting into a fight with Gregory Peck playing Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil. Marathon Man started with two elderly drivers killing each other in a low-speed chase through the streets of New York.

There was child actor Mark Lester's movie, Eyewitness, where his grandfather karate kicks a cop down some stairs and kills him with his own gun. His grandfather wasn't as old as Harrison Ford, of course, but hadn't been in as good a shape as he was to begin with.

Clint Eastwood has played violent old people. 

When he played an aged private detective in The Late Show, Art Carney would flick the hearing aid out of his ear before shooting at people. It was a nice touch. 

In Jim Jarmusch's movie Ghost Dog, I liked the elderly Mafia guys setting out to murder people. If they had been younger, I'd just want them exterminated and, if they were real people, I'd want them locked up immediately so they could suffer for their crimes before it was too late. 

But I hear the computer de-aging thing they did doesn't work terribly well. But it's only an Indiana Jones movie.

Bend of the River (1952) Anthony Mann director

I understand why the hero in a movie western would rescue a man about to be lynched by mountain men, but it was a mistake in this case. James Stewart is leading some covered wagons headed for the Portland, Oregon, area. Arthur Kennedy, the man he saved, joins them but tries to sell what little food they have to gold miners at a huge markup.

Stepin Fetchit should have toned down his schtick for a violent western and they should have let him kill some men. With Rock Hudson. I wouldn't have recognized Harry Morgan in a supporting role if I hadn't heard his voice. With Frances Bavier, TV's Aunt Bea.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

High Noon Part II: The Return of Will Kane (Made for TV, 1980)

Lee Majors was no Gary Cooper. No reason why he should have been, really. If they wanted to make a sequel, much of the original cast was still alive and working, Katy Jurado, Lloyd Bridges and Harry Morgan among them. They were 28 years older, so the sequel would have to be 28 years later. The original was set in 1898, so it would be 1926. It could have been a western with submachine guns.

I remember when Part II was first shown on TV. I didn't watch it. I only heard about it because a friend made fun of Lee Majors. He had given an interview complaining about the negative reaction to it.

High Noon took place entirely in town. Some of the men were simply afraid to help Gary Cooper, others were happy to see him lose. They liked the place better when Frank Miller was there. It took place in real time, (sort of) and ended with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly leaving, clearly with no intention of ever returning.

In High Noon Part II, everyone is happy to see Will Kane. He comes back to town to buy horses. The town looks terrible, much more primitive, filmed in Old Tuscon studios that looks nothing like the town in the real movie.  Most of it takes place out in the desert anyway.

There was just nothing connecting it in any way to the original movie except that Lee Majors plays someone named "Will Kane". 

It could have at least had a lady Quaker kill a man. Maybe Farrah Fawcett should have played Grace Kelly's role.

Written by Elmore Leonard.

Available on Tubi.

Viva Knievel! (1977)

I would never have watched Viva Knievel if it weren't for Rifftrax. It starred Evel Knievel as a mercifully fictionalized version of himself. I had heard of it but never had any desire to see it.

Young people may not even know this now---Evel Knievel was a daredevil by trade who jumped over things on a motorcycle.  He suffered around 200 broken bones. I was a kid back then and we thought this was an achievement. 

In Viva Knieval, Evel accuses a lady photojournalist of only wanting to see him die, like that wasn't what every one of his "fans" packing the stadium was there to observe.

In real life, Knieval tried to murder a man with a baseball bat shortly before the movie was released to theaters. This ruined any chance the movie had financially.

I was surprised that it had Gene Kelly, Red Buttons and Lauren Hutton. With Marjoe Gortner, Dabney Coleman, Frank Gifford and Cameron Mitchell. With child actor Eric Olson who was a junior high kid at the time playing Gene Kelly's estranged son.

A stuntman recreated Knievel's motorcycle jumps and did it without injury. He's the one they should have made a movie about.

Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns (1957)

I'll start with what may be a spoiler. It won't ruin the movie but it might ruin a pretty good scene.

There was something I read long ago, a translation of a review by Jean-Luc Godard of an American western which sounded interesting. It was a review translated from French into English of a movie translated from English into French, and I read it so long ago that I doubt I remember it correctly, but he described a scene where a man holds a woman in front of him at gunpoint and tells another guy to go ahead! Start shooting! So the guy starts shooting and the other one yells Stop shooting! Stop shooting!

This was the movie, apparently, but the scene was different than I remember Godard describing it.

The movie was lovely. The tough gunslinger who comes to town doesn't ride a horse. He has a little horse drawn carriage he rides around in. It looked less masculine, but I wouldn't want to ride a horse, either.

Former gunslinger Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) realized that he can't go around killing people anymore. Now he works for Uncle Sam. He comes to Tombstone in the 1880's with a warrant to arrest one of Barbara Stanwyck's forty hired guns for robbing the U.S. Mail. Stanwyck's a big landowner who rules over the area with an iron fist. Her horrible younger brother takes advantage of this. 

Has a couple of scenes of several middle aged men bathing together in separate wash tubs. This sort of implied nudity has always bothered me. You don't get a real picture of how socially awkward this would be. 

Available on the Criterion Channel.

A little weird that they were taking bubble baths.

Richard Dreyfuss

I don't think I ever knew what his views were specifically. I assume Richard Dreyfuss was a liberal or at least a Democrat. I think I saw him attacked in the Jewish press long ago for criticizing Israel. Now I see that he once called for George Bush, Jr, to be impeached. His mother was a Communist, and good for her, but I don't think he ever was.

Dreyfuss gave a long interview on Firing Line about the teaching of civics in schools, but he began railing against the Motion Picture Academy's minimal new diversity requirements for Best Picture nominees. He went on to defend blackface and expressed rage that he might never get to play a "Black man".

Dreyfuss invoked Laurence Olivier playing Othello:

“He played a Black man brilliantly. Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a Black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play [in] ‘The Merchant of Venice’? Are we crazy? This is so patronizing. It’s so thoughtless and treating people like children.”

I don't get the impression that he was picturing a non-white actor playing Shylock.  I haven't seen that version of Othello, but Laurence Olivier looked terrible. He once said that Mickey Rooney was America's finest actor. It may have been after he saw Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Certain elements in society are supporting Dreyfuss. Most of what I've seen about it reported uncritically on what he said, so I doubt he's now horrified that he blurted this stuff out on TV.

 

Acting is like other art forms. Sometimes you have to make your own gigs.  If his dream is to play a Black man, he needs to make the movie himself. No one will stop him, although his family and friends would plead with him not to do it.

Coronation

I turned on the streaming channel Pluto and watched the last half hour of the coronation repeated on Sky News. 

I was hoping they'd keep cutting away to shots of Harry sitting alone sulking. We did get to see them carrying away protesters.

I was worried about the old guys bustling around, walking up and down the from some platform carrying stuff, all wearing long robes and capes. They all seemed like tripping hazards, a recipe for disaster. People were holding their heads up when they should have been looking down to be sure they didn't step on Camilla's dress trailing along on the floor.

Five Corners (1987) Jodie Foster, John Tuturro, Tim Robbins

Set in The Bronx of the 1960s.

John Turturro gets out of prison a few years after he tried to rape Jodie Foster. Tim Robbins saved her the first time and she turns to him for help. Robbins has become a pacifist and will be going to the South soon as a Freedom Rider. Turturro begins threatening and stalking Foster. 

Two young women sniffing glue in the back seat of a convertible are kicked out by the fiance of one of the girls and they wake up naked in a strange unfurnished apartment. They run into the boys who picked them up the night before. The boys explain that somebody killed their teacher so they have the day off.

They engage in a nightmarish game of elevator surfing---riding on the top of elevators rather than inside them. There are obvious dangers there.

The movie made the Bronx look like a hellhole, but Robbins preparing to be a Freedom Rider made it clear that small towns in the South were far worse although you were less likely to fall to your death there. They talk about the murders of James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi by police/KKK which made the NYPD look good by comparison. 

The story probably could have been set anywhere at the time and the story wouldn't have been much different, just less ethnically diverse and with more appealing regional accents.

George Harrison was one of the producers. They used the Beatles' "In My Life" as the theme song. 

Free on Tubi.

In a Lonely Place (1950)

Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) should have been locked up even if he didn't kill the girl. 

Steele is a Hollywood screenwriter. He's offered a job writing a script based on a novel. Rather than read the book he takes a hatcheck girl who just finished reading it to his apartment to tell him the plot. The poor girl is later found murdered, her body dumped on the side of the road. Being a violent drunk, Dix Steele is the obvious suspect. 

A young woman who lives in his building (Gloria Graham) saw him and gave him an alibi, but police still suspect him, 

Later, Bogart becomes enraged and drives recklessly, sideswipes a car and, even though he's 50-years-old, beats up and nearly murders the driver who's later revealed to be a football player for UCLA. When he asks Gloria Grahame to marry him, she's afraid to say no. They meet with friends to celebrate and Bogart punches one of them. 

An important lesson for all of us about staying away from people like that.

Directed by Nicholas Ray. He was married to Gloria Grahame at the time although they split up during filming.

Martha Stewart, who played the murdered girl, died of COVID at age 98.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Two Thousand Maniacs commentary

I watched Herschell Gordon Lewis's Two Thousand Maniacs. I listened to the commentary. 

They kept saying that they were in it only for the money. They sneered at the auteurs. But I hear that Luc Moullet talked mostly about how about how cheaply he worked, too. It was about the only thing Lewis and Dave Friedman had to talk about.

Lewis pointed out that the lyrics of the songs were more spoken than sung, and that was because Lewis himself did the vocals just so they wouldn't have to pay anyone. 

The horrible bratty kid (Vincent Santos) was a perfectly nice boy. He took direction. Connie Mason couldn't drive well and damaged the car they borrowed from a dealership. 

They didn't mention any difficulties. It all sounded perfectly pleasant. An oddly inoffensive pro-Confederate gore movie.