Behind the Curve (2018)

I have no specific memory of when I first learned that the world was round. We did have a globe in my house and there was a Bugs Bunny cartoon about Columbus, so I was probably hip to it before I started school. I do remember reading about The Flat Earth Society in the 1970s. They barred you from joining if you just wanted to make fun of them. It was a fundamentalist Christian group. 

Behind the Curve is a documentary about people who believe the Earth is flat.

The Flat Earthers today seem to be from a wider range of backgrounds, run of the mill conspiracy nuts who've taken it to a new level.

The movie focuses on Mark Sargent. If he wasn't a major figure among Flat Earth believers before, he is now. 

We briefly see a young woman who lost boyfriends when they found out she was a flat earther and a guy whose divorce was about to be finalized. Membership in this cult isn't doing them any good, but at least a few of them got to star in a documentary, appear on talk shows, speak at conventions, get reported on in the local press and be low level celebrities. 

Free on Tubi. 

Criminally Insane (1975)

The tagline was "Two hundred fifty pounds of maniacal fury!" 

An overweight woman murders people who come between her and her food. 

I remember seeing the box for this in a video store about 35 years ago, and it was attacked in The Golden Turkey Awards. 

It wasn't terribly well-made, but what do you expect? It had synchronized sound, which not all that director's films did. The poor woman is released from a mental hospital and starts killing people. Cruel both to the overweight and the mentally ill.

Only an hour long, but it reportedly took five weeks to film.

Directed by Nick Millard. It's the only movie of his I could find on streaming video, which is sort of sad. He directed 71 movies in a career spanning more than 50 years.

Morgan Spurlock, RIP

Morgan Spurlock has died at 53. Best known for his documentary, Super Size Me, about him eating nothing but McDonald's for a month. He suffered terrible health effects, but other people who tried the same thing couldn't duplicate his alleged results.

In McDonald's defense, I once sat and ate dinner with some of my brother-in-law's family visiting from out of state. They spent days driving around eating only at nice restaurants and they felt horrible, going days on end eating huge meals three times a day. If they had gone to McDonald's, they could have gotten a little hamburger and small fries. And they would have saved a fortune. The worst fast food in the world can be a dainty alternative.

Spurlock died of complications from cancer. Even if his documentary was fake, McDonald's has done just fine, better than they deserve. He made some people cut back on it which is didn't hurt anything.

The Blue Max (1966)

Two men were killed filming Roger Corman's Von Richthofen and Brown (1971). I don't think anyone died making this film. They built their own replica World War One planes with modern engines. Kind of a compromise between using then-50-year-old vintage planes and the CGI they use now. They could have used remote-controlled models like they did in Battle of Britain. Their machineguns never seemed to run out of bullets.

It was made only 50 years after the war, like if they made a movie ten years ago about Vietnamese pilots shooting down American planes, which would be something a lot of us would root for. John McCain was bombing a civilian light bulb factory, a war crime, when he was shot down. To hell with that guy. 

World War One was so pointless it's hard to get excited about it, but George Peppard stars as a German pilot desperate to win The Blue Max, a medal you got for shooting down twenty enemy planes. He should have been happy just to be out of the trenches, where he was in the opening scene, looking up at the biplanes overhead wishing he could be one of those guys.

He was like one of these Hollywood guys. It's not enough that they're rich and famous and working in the movie business---they've just got to have an Oscar.

The arial footage got repetitive. I didn't know which stunts to be impressed by. Flying a plane under a bridge doesn't seem that big a deal, and the pilot reportedly did it over 20 times for the movie.

Shack Out on 101 (1955)

It wasn't very good. Lee Marvin is a cook at a beachside diner owned by Keenan Wynn. Marvin sexually assaults the waitress (Terry Moore) on the beach. And he turns out to be a communist spy. He didn't have access to any secrets and didn't have the impulse control for it, but he was able to play some role in the spy game apparently passing along what other people got their hands on. It all takes place at the diner. Marvin lives in a little back room.

You don't think of Keenan Wynn as a body builder, but he was in pretty good shape. He shames Lee Marvin for his flabby calves.

Math, Brady Bunch, Jesse James, etc

I posted some incorrect information. I thought it was Peter Brady who developed a crush on Jesse James. Turns out it was Bobby. Mike and Carol Brady arrange for an old man to come to the house to tell Bobby how his father was murdered by Jesse James during a train robbery.

Jesse James was killed in 1882. He murdered two men during his second-to-last train robbery in 1881. Burt Mustin, who played the old man, was born in 1884, so his character was a few years older than he was in real life. 

The episode was broadcast in 1973.

This is what I never understood about westerns. People are always saying that the Old West was nothing like the movies, so why were the movies like that? Much of that time period was within living memory when westerns were really popular. There were old timers walking around who had lived through at least the tail end of the wild west.

Wyatt Earp worked in Hollywood in the 1920s. Silent film western star William S Hart knew Earp and Bat Masterson. John Wayne knew Earp and reportedly imitated his walk and his speech patterns which might explain a lot, that he modeled himself after an 80-year-old man.

The old show, 26 Men, supposedly based on true stories of the Arizona Rangers had surviving members of the Arizona Rangers introduce episodes of the show. 

There are war movies which aren't true to life, but war movies make war seem less traumatic, not more. 

From Wikipedia:

In 2013, Marshall Trimble, the board president of the Arizona Historical Society and vice president of the Wild West History Association, documented that Matt Dillon's TV character was shot at least 56 times, knocked unconscious 29 times, stabbed three times, and poisoned once.

That was Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke, which, in fairness, was on TV for twenty years. He was shot on average fewer than three times a year. There were 635 episodes.  They did over thirty episodes a year which means some of them were only shown once. There weren't enough weeks in the year to re-run all of them. If they had done only 6 episodes per season like the British, he would have led a much easier life.

There's no way to know, but Jesse James did kill around 20 people, not counting the ones he murdered in the Civil War, and he was only 34 when someone finally shot him in the head. So maybe my whole premise here is wrong.

Roger Corman, RIP

Roger Corman has died at age 98. I read recently that he was semi-retired. The first movies of his that I had a specific memory of watching were The Day the World Ended (1955) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). They both made an impression on me. I was on summer vacation from junior high school and discovered the pleasure of watching TV in the middle of the night. I vaguely remember seeing his name on the screen and wondering who he was.

Critics slam Seinfeld

Jerry Seinfeld's directorial debut, Unfrosted, a spoof about the creation of Pop Tarts, has gotten a pitiful 42% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes although the trade press, Variety and Hollywood Reporter, liked it. 

I don't have Netflix so I'm not going to see it but I thought the promo for it was funny,  and I'm biased against Seinfeld and his anti-"woke" stuff, railing against what he thinks is the "far left".