Christopher Forbes again

Parker Stevenson, TV's Frank Hardy, as General Sherman.

I don't know what's wrong with me. Watched another Christopher Forbes movie. The poor guy is truly the worst filmmaker ever. But, no, I haven't seen the work of every filmmaker ever. I have no idea who the worst is.

I stumbled on this (positive) review of one of his movies:

A coherent script — never a certainty in a Forbes’ film — sure helps. So do solid performances from his leads, Heather Clark and Tripp Courtney.

So does cohesive direction from Forbes, who avoids the pointless tangents that mar so many of his other films.

The tiny budget shows — from aging, overweight actors to Civil War battle scenes that include no more than a handful of soldiers.   

I've tended to be in favor of old and overweight actors but I'm starting to have my doubts. I think Forbes uses Civil War reenactors as actors. 

The critic in this case was reviewing The Confederate about a young woman in drag who joins the traitorous Confederate Army. I've heard there were a number of women who did this in the Civil War. Displays of nudity must not have been part of military service in those days.

Forbes has made up to five movies a year since 2005, forty-six total. If he could just make sense. 

Sinead O'Connor, RIP

I don't listen to music and knew little about Sinead O'Connor. 

She died today at age 56.

She converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her name to Shuhada' Sadaqat, but she continued to use her Sinead O'Connor as a stage name.

I was watching Saturday Night Live the night she tore up the picture of Pope John-Paul II. I thought nothing of it and was surprised that so many people got whatever religious undergarment they wore in such a bunch over it.

I don't remember how they phrased it, but the Catholic Church put out a statement comparing it to voodoo, that tearing up a picture was something like sticking a pin in a doll.

Of course, that cuts both ways. Why were idolatrous Catholics so protective of a graven image? 

That was in 1992. In 2017, I posted this:

Okay, so one time, Sinead O'Connor, who was abused as a teenager in a "Magdalene Asylum", tore up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live. David Spade reported in his memoir that he picked up a piece of the picture as a keepsake. But, he said, he was later called into an office by network security who wanted it back. Someone on the crew had apparently picked up the remaining pieces and sold them to Inside Edition which pasted the picture back together minus Spade's piece and showed it on TV.

So how was it that Joe Pesci appeared on the show the next week and claimed in his monologue that he had demanded that the picture be pasted back together? He held it up to the audience and showed it to them, it missing a corner piece. It was Inside Edition that pasted it together and it had nothing to do with him.

Pesci later appeared on David Letterman's show and repeated the story, again bearing false witness....

Joe Pesci violating the eight commandment was kind of beside the point, but it was years after the event and I had just heard an interview with David Spade promoting his book.

Here's a better article by Gary Leupp from 2010:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2010/03/22/fight-the-real-enemy/
 

Spacey wins

The Kevin Spacey legal juggernaut has won again. Acquitted of all charges.

He went to Britain voluntarily to stand trial. He would have looked like an idiot if he were convicted.

Kevin Spacey sweating it out

The jury's still out in the Kevin Spacey trial. The charges against him carry a possible life sentence. 

Will the British jury associate Spacey with their country's own celebrities who got away with horrible sex crimes for decades, or will he seem pretty harmless by comparison? Will they resent a foreigner coming to their country and groping their "blokes", or will their natural servility to the upper classes kick in? And what about Spacey's failure to keep a stiff upper lip?

"Blubbing on the wi'ness stand, 'e was!"

We'll see what they decide. Spacey must have thought his chances were pretty good. He went there to stand trial voluntarily.

Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (Mark L Lester, 1976)

An early Mark L. Lester effort.

Stars Marjoe Gortner and Lynda Carter. Half Bonnie & Clyde, half Aloha Bobby and Rose and half something else. Has a reference to Deliverance. Marjoe makes a pudgy vigilante squeal like a pig.

Marjoe smiles too much. He shows some concern when he first kills a man, but being a wanted murderer doesn't bother him as much as it might have.

Marjoe Gortner had been a child evangelist, ordained at age four. A young couple made a mockery of their own wedding at that time by having him conduct the ceremony. When he was about 20, he got a film crew to record his last tour on the revival circuit revealing its seedy underbelly. The film, Marjoe, won an Oscar for best documentary.  He was somehow able to parlay this in an acting career. His hyper-religious background made me wonder how he felt about doing the sex scenes with Lynda Carter, TV's Wonder Woman.

I'm giving away the ending here but I don't think it matters. It ends with Lynda Carter spitting in the sheriff's face and calling him a bastard because the cops killed her spree-killer boyfriend who she only met a few days earlier. They killed him in a gunfight. But the cops also killed her sister and one of her pre-crime spree girlfriends, but who should she blame for that.

Free on Pluto.

Tony Bennett, RIP

Tony Bennett died this morning at age 96.

From his obituary in the New York Times: 

Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, and, along with Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, performed at the Stars for Freedom rally on the City of St. Jude campus on the outskirts of Montgomery on March 24, the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address that came to be known as the “How Long? Not Long” speech. At the conclusion of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove Mr. Bennett to the airport; she was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan. 

New bit of information in Sam Bankman-Fried case

From counterpunch.com:

...one of the lawsuits emerging from the bankruptcy of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX discloses that company executives planned to buy the island of Nauru, which they planned to escape to in the event of a global calamity: “In the event that half or more of the global population perished, the island would then be used to ensure the survival of members of the effective altruism movement.”

British school children horror

 

That's from Cracked.com. I'm not sure it's an entirely irrational fear.

Here are two items from the trivia section in IMDb for Bugsy Malone (1976), the gangster musical performed entirely by tweens which was filmed in the UK:

Jodie Foster has admitted in interviews that she found many of the British cast terrifying because of the antics they would get up to.

There was a rivalry between the UK and US kids that included the UK dance girls blocking the halls in Pinewood Studios to the US actors/dancers. If they didn't give the "password", they would spray them with a fire extinguisher.

My earliest memory of British, albeit Scottish, schoolchildren was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. They hung a classmate over a railing and threatened to drop her to her death. I saw it in a drive-in when I was five or six and slept through the rest of it.

A review of the 1990 version of Lord of the Flies took the view that making the kids American instead of British ruined the story because the British were so civilized---American children spiraling into savagery was less dramatic because they were already halfway there. That critic may have had it backwards. 

Jane Birkin, RIP

I've only seen a few of her movies, Blow-Up, La Piscine, Death on the Nile, and Kung Fu Master!  and I saw those before I really knew who she was. My younger brother started performing the music of Serge Gainsbourg with whom Birkin had a 12 year relationship. This was how I became familiar with her work.

Jane Birkin died today, 16 July, at age 76, which seems young to me now.

Blast! Rot! Bloody hell! says Kevin Spacey

Kevin Spacey testified in his trial in the U.K. In the report I read, Spacey said the accusations against him were "absolute b******s". 

I couldn't figure out what dirty word they didn't want to spell out. Turns out it was "bollocks" which must be terribly offensive in the Old Country. 

Be careful what you say over there. Terms that seem innocuous and Englandy here may be deeply upsetting to the people there.

It wasn't clear to me if he made that particular statement in court. 

Assuming he's acquitted, my hope is that he'll be the new John Carradine, appearing in scores of low budget movies. In the early '70's, Carradine would appear in a movie for as little as $100 (about $700 today). 

Andy Dick still appears in low budget movies and he's a registered sex offender. He was arrested once for assault with a deadly weapon. They ought to be able to put Kevin Spacey in things.

Andy Dick has a Kevin Spacey connection. Wikipedia says Dick was friends with Anthony Rapp "since childhood", which is a little strange since he's six years older than Rapp.

Eminence Hill (Western, 2019)

It was more interesting than others in this genre. But it starts the way they all do, with criminals appearing at an isolated farm, appearing at first to be friendly or at least not hostile, then murdering everyone. They usually leave the children and in this movie they abduct the teen daughter to sell into slavery. 

The criminal gang is being pursued by two former criminals now on the side of justice. They find themselves visiting some other seemingly defenseless people, this time in a religious commune. Things don't go as well for the criminals this time.

It made me think of a couple of films, one Russian, one Ukrainian, where people find themselves in this situation, out in the country with no chance of getting any help with obviously dangerous people trying not to scare them. But in those movies, they had philosophical discussions and talked about their lives and how they happened to be there. One had a Ukrainian fascist talking with a couple of Soviet Red Army deserters, another had an ineffectual Soviet professor who taught courses in atheism in a debate an ex-convict murderer turned Christian.   

The violence was okay, although they shot a child or teenager at one point.

The movie seemed fine. The acting was good. I liked the way the detective saw through people, jumped correctly to conclusions, and was really good at shooting people but not absurdly so. Costumes were good. There were no cowboys walking around in modern sport coats like I've seen in some of these things. If anyone was wearing polyester, I couldn't tell. 

From an interview with teen star Anna Harr:

...But honestly, I never really watched any kind of western before so I had no idea what I was getting into. I’ve done a western a long time ago, but it was a short and I don’t really count it … So this is like my first feature western, but I mean it’s interesting on set because there’s a bunch of great actors and everything is old-fashioned and everything like that, and there were horses were on set.

Available on Tubi.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

I half watched Three Days of the Condor for the first time in years. I knew people who thought I should like it but it was hard for me to identify with a CIA guy even if other CIA guys were trying to murder him.

I don't remember how I reacted the first time I saw it when I was in junior high and it was on HBO.

Don't be like Robert Redford. If you walk into your place of employment and find that people have been murdered, you should leave at once and call 911. The murderers may still be in the building.

With Max Von Sydow, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and John Houseman, and you'll be happy to see Russell Johnson as an intelligence officer in a briefing.

I bought another book like an idiot

I ordered a book. It was just another book on zero budget movie production. It was stupid because by now it's pretty obvious how to make a movie with no money. I think the only purpose they serve now is to reassure the would-be zero-budget filmmaker that they can get away with all sorts of things. The one that made the most sense to me was Mike Carroll's Naked Filmmaking which assured readers that they don't need a crew, that you can use automatic settings on a video camera, that you may have to move your actors closer to a window or a lamp but you can film in existing light if that's what you want to do and that some camcorders have perfectly good built-in mics although he was partial to wireless mics.

But I bought this other book. I regretted it when I read more about the author and learned he was an alt right jackass. But when I tried to arrange to return it to Amazon they gave me something I was supposed scan on a smart phone. I don't know why they assume every person owns a smart phone. Then I had to take it to a grocery store owned by Amazon, so I put off returning it until it was too late and now I'm stuck with it.

Read a little of it. It wasn't terrible. I watched one of his very low budget westerns on Tubi and it was better than most of the others I've seen. It was coherent anyway. The alt-right stuff, if you didn't recognize what he was getting at, was sort of interesting, too. Those people try to defend slavery by saying that free Blacks owned slaves, too. In general, Blacks who bought slaves bought members of their own families in order to free them. In the case of whites, it was the opposite. White slave owners fathered children who remained slaves. They enslaved and sold their own children.

But it was an interesting twist in the movie that a violent, psychopathic Black guy was a former slave owner. Interesting that anyone would consider this a defense of the Confederacy.

Roseanne Barr

Several years ago, Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett which got her removed from her own TV show. 

She had already called for critics of Israel to be killed. She had tried to become the Green Party's presidential candidate but abruptly became a Trump supporter because the left criticizes Israel.

Now she has said in a podcast interview that "Nobody died in the Holocaust, either. That's the truth." She denied it, but she was in favor of it: “It should happen. Six million Jews should die right now ‘cause they cause all the problems in the world. But it never happened.”

She's Jewish and reportedly had relatives murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania.

Extreme racism in itself had never been considered a mental illness simply because it's so common, but during the last big controversy, Michael Moore wrote this about Roseanne:

“Roseanne seems to be suffering from some sort of madness. It’s more than just saying she’s a racist,” Moore writes. “She operates in the same sewer of lies, conspiracy theories and bigotry that’s been rising in America for years and that has now succeeded in electing our current president. Totally nuts.” 

“But she is also a damaged soul. Most people don’t know that she has suffered her entire life from a massive head injury she received during a serious car accident when she was a child. Her brain injuries were immense and she spent months in the hospital struggling to recover,” he continues.

As it happened, Roseanne had tweeted or re-tweeted an attack on Michael Moore the same day she made her attack on Jarrett.

It may be hard to feel sympathy for her, but you probably should.

A Matter of Faith, 2014

Harry Anderson plays a university biology prof. He teaches evolution and thinks that Olympic athletes running faster than they used to is proof of evolution. A Christian girl's father is shocked that a public university isn't teaching creationism. 

We see the father talking with his wife:

"Listen to what it says in this high school textbook I picked up at the library. 'Humans came from ape-like ancestors. There is nothing supernatural about the origins of human beings.'"

"How can they say that and get away with it?"

Turns out that Anderson's predecessor at the college taught creationism, so Anderson got him fired. 

Anderson' character is weirdly sinister. Two Christian students talk about him:

"He'll give you a C as a final grade if you just show up without doing any work. Didn't you ever wonder about that?  I mean, no other teacher does that."

"Maybe that's why he's the most popular instructor on campus."

"Or the one with the biggest agenda.... He teaches his evolution lies to get students to doubt their faith in God and the Bible."

It's reasonably well made. Someone compared it to a Hallmark movie. 

Anderson is inexplicably crushed in a debate with the girl's father. They get off the subject of evolution and he rails against religion in general and pooh-poohs life after death.

I don't know how someone from a mainline denomination would react to it. I can't imagine it converting anyone. Which makes it less interesting. If you want to make your own propaganda film promoting anything other than creationism, you wouldn't look to this as a model.

Free on Tubi.