Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced

Sam Bankman-Fried has been sentenced to a modest 25 years which means he could be out in 12.5 years.

Man. You'd have to be crazy NOT to steal billions of dollars.

Hannah and her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)

The movie starts with a Thanksgiving dinner. The kid's table is in the background. And, at the kid's table are Moses Farrow, Daisy Previn, and Fletcher Previn. Soon-yi Previn was there somewhere. 

I didn't recognize Louis Black, but he's in the movie. I didn't see John Turturro but, according to the credits, he was in it. I did recognize Elaine from Seinfeld. 

Woody Allen modestly listing the cast in alphabetical order in the opening credits always bothered me since his name is Allen. Has he ever not had his name appear first?

Hannah has two sisters. One lives with crabby misanthropic artist Max Von Sydow who acts like a genius and is trying to "educate" her. She starts sleeping with Hannah's husband (Michael Caine who got an Oscar out of it).

Hannah had fixed up her neurotic ex-husband, Woody Allen, with her other sister who had a cocaine problem which was one reason their date didn't go well.

In a subplot, Woody Allen's character goes through a health scare and tries to find religion while grappling with his own mortality. Meanwhile, actor Lloyd Nolan playing Hannah's father had cancer and was on his last legs.

Reportedly modeled on Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. 

Allen reported in his memoir that he doesn't shoot coverage. He films just what he needs. He doesn't film unnecessary retakes for every conceivable angle. In this movie, it meant he didn't have enough footage for one scene, so the editor took care of it by adding an intertitle. Then they scattered intertitles throughout the film so it wouldn't stand out.

One of the few Woody Allen movies to include a firearms accident. It had some funny lines. 

Long ago, I read a review of the movie in a Jewish newspaper. Their critic was a rabbi who accused almost everything he reviewed of anti-Semitism. He pointed out that in this movie, Max Von Sydow says he watched a "boring documentary" about Auschwitz, Woody Allen says that his date gone wrong was like the Nuremberg Trials, and in one scene where attractive young architect Sam Waterston is showing the sisters his favorite buildings in New York, the camera pans over to the Fifth Avenue Synagogue which, in fairness, was kind of weird-looking.

As Wikipedia put it:

In the 1986 Woody Allen film, Hannah and her Sisters the building is panned across while being criticized for its architectural incongruity — "That's disgusting. That's really terrible." — after a shot of the consistent facades of the rest of the block.

The rabbi/critic defended the synagogue's appearance and said that there must have been a lot of other unattractive buildings in the city Allen could have used.

My sister pointed out that the only Black person in the movie was a household servant.

Altered States (1980)

William Hurt as a university professor. He sleeps with his students and experiments with an isolation tank. It's tank where you float in water. There's no light, no sound, no feeling. A certain percentage of people in these things will start to hallucinate. I remember a teacher talking about this in the mid-'70's. Hurt's character also takes hallucinogens. He begins having visions of early hominids and begins to physically transform into a little prehistoric apeman.

There are things that wouldn't happen today. A janitor sees the apeman from a distance and tells a security guard that a chimpanzee escaped from the lab. The two men walk through the place looking for the chimp. I think people now realize how dangerous apes are and would stay out of there. Of course, they were no match for the caveman, either.

The script was by Paddy Chayefsky. His dialog was verbose, better suited to 1920's stage play than a movie. Director Ken Russell couldn't make any significant changes without Chayefsky suing him, so he had to figure out how to make this terrible dialog sound realistic. He had the actors talk fast, yell, or talk while eating. When I saw this thing as a teenager, I realized they could have relaxed and delivered all their lines speaking calmly. It left me with warped ideas about acting. Everything is expressed verbally. Emoting doesn't add much to it.

With Charles Haid just one year before Hill Street Blues, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban and 5-year-old Drew Barrymore. Miguel Godreau as the Primal Man.

One of the few movies where an apeman has clearly defined buttocks.

I fell asleep with this playing on streaming video. Was awakened by the apeman shrieking and decided not to watch the rest of it alone in the dark.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976-1977)

Norman Lear's soap opera, broadcast five days a week in the 1970's starring Woody Allen's ex-wife, Louise Lasser in the title role. 

It wasn't available anywhere on streaming video, so I bought it on DVD on eBay. It was only on for two seasons but there were 325 episodes. They filmed an episode a day so they were working fast and it showed. Still, each episode went by fast. It was easy viewing. 

I watched it off and on when it was first broadcast. The only things I really remember were one where a child evangelist is taking a bath. A TV set is suspended over the bathtub so he'll have something to watch with predictable results and there was Mary Hartman's appearance on the David Suskind show.

So far, I've only watched a few episodes. Mary's grandfather is arrested as the Fernwood Flasher, an entire neighbor family is murdered, her young daughter is being stalked, apparently by the killer, her other neighbor is trying to become a country music star, and her husband has lost interest in her. And her kitchen floor has developed waxy yellow build-up.

Trotskyists comment on Rust shooting, prosecutions

With all the talk about how great zero-budget film is, the way anybody can make some kind of a movie now on digital video, there's this, perhaps ironically, from the World Socialist Website on the accident on the set of the movie Rust:

...Local and state officials, with the complicity of the film industry and the industry’s unions, have made every effort to scapegoat Gutierrez-Reed, a young, inexperienced film worker, 24 years old at the time, and, as an actor, Baldwin. This is part of a joint effort to divert attention from the dangerous conditions on film and television sets and the consequences in particular of low-budget filmmaking, with inadequate staffing and training, undertaken in the interests of cutting costs and boosting film company profits.

In the new motion to dismiss, Baldwin’s attorneys claim that New Mexico state prosecutors have abused “an innocent person whose rights have been trampled to the extreme.” The lawyers, however, place all the blame on Gutierrez-Reed, arguing that the armorer “is the autonomous decision maker with regard to gun safety” and that Gutierrez-Reed was responsible for Hutchins’ death because “it was foreseeable that Baldwin would not check the gun.”

The attorneys also cite a report from the New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau that “demonstrates that Baldwin was not part of Rust management and that his authority on set was limited to creative decisions.”

His legal team is attempting to defend Baldwin as an actor, while claiming that Baldwin the producer was not actually on the set in a management position. Prosecutors allege that Baldwin was responsible both as the actor who held the weapon and in his capacity as a co-producer.

Rust, whose filming was eventually completed in Montana, is known in the film industry as an Ultra-Low Budget film. This is part of a tier structure agreed to by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which allows producers to hire nonunion crews if union members are unwilling to accept the low wages and poor conditions.

Immediately preceding the October 2021 accident, several workers who had made written complaints about safety violations the previous night, including three weapon misfires on the set in the last week, were fired and escorted off the set by security. Numerous workers reported not being paid for weeks and having to sleep on the set due to working 14- to 16-hour shifts, and having to drive 50 miles to their hotels. The Rust shooting also occurred mere days after IATSE called off an impending strike in which one of the issues would have been the conditions workers throughout the industry face daily.

Woody Allen not retiring just yet

 

From the World of Reel website:

Allen has hinted that ”Coup de Chance,” his 50th film, might not be his last one. He keeps reiterating that it all depends on whether he can get financing, which would most likely come from European money.

Some good news. In a new interview with Spanish filmmaker David Trueba, the 88-year-old Allen confirms that he is currently trying to launch a new film, which could start shooting as early as this summer in Italy. No other details were given.

Last fall, Allen had stated that he had a “great story” for a film set in NYC and that “it's one of the best ideas I've ever had.” Has he just moved the setting to Italy? Maybe this is a totally different film.

He's just a couple years older than the president will be at the end of the term if he's re-elected. Other countries have movie directors in their 90's or older. I saw a movie made by a guy who was 103. It's probably a good thing to drive home to film students and would-be film students that film is an old person's art although I think Allen himself said just the opposite recently.  

House on Telegraph Hill (1951)

Polish concentration camp inmate Victoria Kowelska (Valentina Cortese) takes on the identity of a dead friend whose child had been sent to live with a relative in the United States. Victoria does this in hopes of reaching the U.S. herself.

She arrives in the U.S., meets and marries a guy related to her by marriage (Richard Basehart) and moves in with him in a huge old house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. There's a playhouse where the child was nearly killed in a large explosion supposedly cause by his chemistry set. There's a nanny for the child who tries to come between him and Victoria. There are couple of plot twists.

In one scene, someone has cut the brake line on her car. As she speeds out of control, she goes past a place that looked like one of the intersections in Bullitt. The Steve McQueen movie was filmed just 18 years later, so it could have been the same place.

The movie took place five years after the concentration camp had been liberated. I would have thought the experience would have had some lingering effects but she seemed to adapt pretty well to her new life.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

They explained why a Tiger was in Africa

Forbidden Jungle (1950)

A safari of sorts slowly makes its way through the jungle. They all appear to be white, but several of the men are forced to carry a cage holding a tiger. They somehow made it clear they were in Africa. The hunter leading the group explains that he caught the tiger in India and was heading for North America but on the way he got another assignment in Africa, to find a 30-year-old jungle boy who had grown up with the animals. He was afraid of losing the tiger so he put it in a cage and carried it with him into the jungle. It was a stupid explanation, but at least they explained it.

Not much to say about it. In the opening shot you can see that the movie was filmed in a studio in front of a painted backdrop. Maybe they planned on cropping the image to make it a wide-screen movie, because you could see the top of the backdrop. But it was part of the aesthetic. Of all the things wrong with it, that was pretty minor.

A lot of stock footage of wildlife. With Crash Corrigan in a gorilla suit.

Available on Pub-D-Hub. It's public domain, so probably available other places as well.

Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe (1964)

My sister wanted to watch a movie so we made it a double feature, two nights in a row. Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was the first night. I'm usually disappointed in Peter Sellers movies, but this was his best work. With George C. Scott, Slim Pickens, Sterling Haden and James Earl Jones. A deranged Air Force general orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Only he know the code to recall the B-52's carrying out the attack. The president of the United States (Peter Sellers) calls the Soviet Premiere from the War Room to alert him. British actors playing American characters with very good American accents are common now, but that was a trail Sellers blazed. He also had the title role playing a "former" Nazi scientist who changed his name to Strangelove to sound more American and British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake who kept trying to humor Sterling Haden to get the code to recall the bombers.

One thing that bothered me about the movie was that everyone had a "funny" name. Keenen Wynn played a Colenol named Bat Guano. 

Fail Safe had an almost identical plot. In fact, the author of the novel on which Dr Strangelove was based sued the author of the novel Fail Safe for plagiarism. 

A wing of supersonic Vindicator bombers (actually supersonic B-58 Hustler bombers) are sent to nuke Moscow. Their radios are jammed and they can't recall them until after they've entered Soviet airspace. The pilots were carefully selected to be mindless automatons who would carry out the attack no matter what. The voice of the president calling for them to turn back doesn't matter because the Soviets could imitate his voice, so they bring in the pilot's wife to plead with him but he won't listen to her, either.

The president keeps ordering people to commit suicide. U.S. fighter pilots pursue the bombers, launch their missiles and crash into the arctic ocean. The U.S. ambassador in Moscow is ordered to stand on the room of the embassy and wait for death.

Dom DeLuise's movie debut. With Henry Fonda as the president, Larry Hagman as his Russian interpreter, and Sorrell Booke, with Walter Mattheau in an early role playing an evil professor who keeps arguing for the U.S. to launch an all out war on the USSR, making the same arguments George C. Scott did in Dr Strangelove.

Joe Camp, RIP

Joe Camp died yesterday at age 84. He made the Benji movies including Oh, Heavenly Dog starring Chevy Chase. Also made a mystery, The Double McGuffin.

I saw Benji in a theater back in 1974. I must have been 11 and it bothered me that the dog wasn't really an actor and didn't understand the storyline he was acting out. Bob Barker once said it was his favorite movie and, according to IMDb, it was a "guilty pleasure" of Alfred Hitchcock.

One of the sequels, Benji the Hunted, was attacked by Michael Medved who lashed out against it because Benji doesn't come when his owner calls him and stays in the woods to save some orphaned baby animals.

Bowanga, Bowanga (1951)

Three white guys are abducted by white African women in two piece swimsuits.

A little more realistic than similar films. The women barely speak English and it takes place in a desert rather than a jungle. Good-size women. They beat up the men.

"You don't think they're cannibals, do you?"

"...They could be treacherous in other ways."

Not much you can say about it. The women must have been wrestlers.

Available on Pub-D-Hub.

Ishtar (1987) Elaine May

I have two brothers who are jazz musicians and they and their musician friends loved this movie. They thought the bad lyrics were hilarious. There are amateur musicians who record in the same studios the professionals use, and most of them are very nice people. The professional musicians like them and get along with them, but their songs are not good. We can't be geniuses at everything.

And I'll mention this. Some years ago, Natalie Portman railed against Woody Allen:

“I don’t think that’s what the conversation should be about. I think it should be about: Why didn’t Elaine May make a movie every year? Why didn’t Nora Ephron make a movie every year?"

She was right that there should be more women filmmakers, but Woody Allen makes a movie a year because his sister goes to Europe and raises money year after year. He apparently stays within his budget. Elaine May, on the other hand, made Ishtar for $55 million, nearly $150 million today, far more than Woody Allen's ever spent, and this was, as Warren Beatty put it, a gift to her to give her a chance to show what she could do as a director. He was grateful to her for the work she put into re-writing a couple of his movies, Heaven Can Wait and Reds. She also did a re-write on Hoffman's movie, Tootsie.

Two painfully bad singer-songwriters (Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman) travel to north African to perform and find the country crawling with CIA on the verge of revolution. With Charles Grodin. It wasn't great but it wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be at the time. It was attacked for being so expensive which, Beatty argued, shouldn't be the audience's concern.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

John Wayne, Brannigan (1975)

My impression was that this and McQ were attempts by John Wayne to be another Dirty Harry. He kicks in doors and says, "Knock knock." He threatens and beats information out of people. He's looking for a racketeer (John Vernon, the mayor from Dirty Harry) who fled to England when he was indicted in Chicago. Brannigan flies to the U.K. to bring him back but finds that he's been kidnapped.

The joke is that the British cops are so by-the-book and Brannigan is so tough and plays by his own rules. He carries a gun which he has no right to do in Britain. There's a barroom brawl that's like something from a western, people punching each other and breaking chairs over their heads without  anyone being hurt or killed.

Draft dodger John Waye keeps claiming to have been in London during the war. Young people today don't seem to know that World War Two veterans hated John Wayne for staying out of the war.

There's kind of a romantic thing between John Wayne and a much younger English policewoman.

It was interesting to see England in the mid-70's but not with John Wayne walking around. Although, now that I think about it, I had a friend in high school who loved this movie.

McQ had a better ending. Filmed around Seattle, it had a car chase down a beach. The thrilling climax here is just John Wayne shooting at a Jaguar.

Free on Tubi.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966)

And why SHOULDN'T Jesse James meet Frankenstein's daughter, allthough I think it was actually his granddaughter. The Cartwrights on Bonanza met Charles Dickins. 

I never understood Jesse James' appeal. There was an episode of The Brady Bunch where Peter, misled by movies, became an admirer. Mike and Carol introduce him to an old man whose father was murdered by Jesse James. They could have just told Peter that Jesse James was a Confederate, a traitorous racist monster. 

Frankstein's granddaughter has left Vienna and come to America to an area where electrical storms are more common. She needs that electricity to bring dead guys back to life.

The movie wasn't that awful. Directed by old B movie director William Beaudine.

Free on Tubi.

 

Richard Lewis on cinema

 Quote from the late Richard Lewis found on Counterpunch.com:

I’m obsessive-compulsive. For example, I can watch John Cassavetes’s films over and over again. When I used to date women much younger than me, I would put them through training periods—”This is Ingmar Bergman week,” “This is Stanley Kubrick week.” It was very controlling, because they had to enjoy what I enjoyed. I see now how foolish and crazy and narcissistic it was. I like dark films. There’s a French film called The Mother and the Whore [1973]. It came out about a year after Last Tango in Paris [1972], which blew my mind and frightened me because it’s all about fear of intimacy. When I watch Marlon Brando in that movie now and I realize that I’m so much older now than he was when he was in it . . . Even though I got married, I still have . . . you know, those shadows followed me, those intimacy problems. The Mother and the Whore, though, was directed by Jean Eustache. He was this guy who came after the French New Wave and who wound up committing suicide. Jean-Pierre Léaud, who was one of my favorite actors, is in the movie. So I come home one night and I’m watching this film and I’m saying, “God, it looks like a [Bernardo] Bertolucci movie. It’s so dark. But I’ve never seen Jean-Pierre in a movie like this.” And it went on and on. It’s a masterpiece. It’s the greatest film I’ve ever seen on the Madonna-whore complex. So I do obsess over these films—I watch them over and over because, I guess, I sort of feel less alone and less crazy when I see some of these works of darkness.

Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed convicted of manslaughter

Acquitted of destroying evidence for allegedly disposing of some cocaine.

Watched a couple of YouTube videos discussing the case. There were questions about where the live ammunition came from and there was footage of Alec Baldwin shooting a scene firing a gun then demanding the armorer hurry and reload so they could do a retake. If he wanted to rush it, they should have skipped the re-takes. It was only a western. How good does it need to be? 

She's facing a maximum 18 month sentence.

Why even use real guns? They have to use fake guns anyway when they have an actor who's a convicted felon. There was a scene in this movie where a 13-year-old fires a gun and accidentally kills a man and they didn't use a blank---they added smoke and muzzle flash digitally.

I know I'm repeating myself but actors have been killed and injured firing blanks on movie sets before. Bruce Willis suffered hearing loss on the set of a Die Hard movies by firing blanks in a closed space. And there was the time that real, fully functional submachine guns were stolen from the set of The Untouchables around 1960.

I still want to know if that film professor had any second thoughts about demanding that college kids use only real guns in their student films.  

Freddy Got Fingered on The Criterion Channel?

I've never seen it so what do I know? Maybe it's brilliant. They have Freddy Got Fingered playing on The Criterion Channel, and if I'm reading this correctly it's their most popular title.

Oh, I see. They're featuring Razzie-"winning" films. 

Irredeemable affront to good taste? Or subversive Dada masterpiece? Critically reviled upon its release but increasingly recognized for its undeniable, go-for-broke audacity, Tom Green’s infamous gross-out comedy is a true cinematic Rorschach test. Described by Green himself as the “touching story of a young man who desperately wants to make his daddy proud,” FREDDY GOT FINGERED casts the writer-director-star as Gord, an unemployed wannabe cartoonist whose desperate attempts to please his father (Rip Torn) lead him into all sorts of misadventures—whether it’s getting way too friendly with a horse on a stud farm, creating his own form of sausage-based performance art, or wreaking havoc inside a hospital delivery room.

Maybe Dada just wasn't very good.

Richard Lewis, RIP

I watched Richard Lewis's last episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Kind of an awful episode where much of the humor revolved around looking up the leg of men's shorts and seeing their genitalia. This is what we would have been watching on Seinfeld all these years if it hadn't been for the snotty network censors. 

It's been noted elsewhere that, in the episode, that Lewis told David that he would leave money for him in his will. 

"When I die, I want you to know how much I care about you."

From a statement by Larry David:

“Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me. He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”