Monday, September 16, 2024

Swamp Girl (1971)


Not that offensive. Rated GP in its day. Seven people were killed if I counted right, they kept referring to the Black character using a terrible racial slur, and it had this swamp doctor who pregnant women kept going to. The doctor would promise to put their baby girls up for adoption, then sell them into white slavery, but this was explained in a dialog scene. Most of the movie was dialog. I assume the Georgia accents were authentic. The doctor and the child traffickers were killed with a hatchet before the story began. Shot in the Okefenokee swamp. The place didn't look quite the way I would have pictured it.

Free on Movieland.Tv.

Friday, September 13, 2024

The Big Bus (1976)


I must have been 13 when I saw this in a theater. I went to it alone. I think I got all the jokes. I just didn't think they were funny, and seeing it again after all these years, I still don't.

Disaster movie spoof about a very large nuclear powered bus. Oil companies target it on its maiden voyage across the United States.

Joe Bologna, Stockard Channing, Ruth Gordon, Larry Hagman, John Beck, Rene Auberjonois, Ned Beatty, Bob Dishy, Jose Ferrer, Richard Mulligan, Sally Kellerman, Stuart Margolin, and Howard Hessman among others.

Free on Movieland.Tv. I was surprised to find it was available on a couple of other streaming channels. I haven't seen this thing available anywhere in years.


Thursday, September 12, 2024

The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972)



I had seen the box for this movie in video stores over the years but never checked it out. I assumed it was a comedy based on the alliterative title. I may have related it to The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County. Stars teen actor Gary Grimes.

Grimes first starred in Summer of '42 as a kid who does nothing but talk about sex and goes to bed with a war widow. The Culpepper Cattle Co. was his second starring role as a teen who desperately wants to be a cowboy. He gets hired to go on a cattle drive, serving as their "Little Mary" which is what they call the cook's assistant.

The movie went for gritty realism, but I like to think it was grittier than it was realistic. Cowboys keep getting into gunfights with cattle rustlers, horse thieves, and, in the end, a greedy land baron extorting money from them because their cattle was on his land. It turns out that a religious commune has also stopped on land he considers to be his and he plans to murder them---that's what they do to squatters there. The commune members refuse to leave but also refuse to fight. This leads to the final confrontation.

Free on Movieland.Tv.

Sunday, September 8, 2024

New Adventures of Old Christine, psychoanalysis


Pluto started showing The New Adventures of Old Christine, so I started watching that a lot. Binge watching doesn't work that well. Sit com characters tend to be one note and they get old really fast. I can't remember if I watched this show when it was still on or if I only started watching it in syndication. I remember the kid being the center of the show, the reason Christine is in constant contact with her ex-husband and his girlfriend, with her brother and with the mean moms at his high-priced private school, but the kid does almost nothing on the show. He's there for about a minute in each episode then he runs off to his room.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the daughter of a French billionaire in real life. I don't know how I should feel about her playing a less well-off mother constantly being put down by the wealthy mothers at her son's school. 

More of a sex comedy than I remembered.

Also, I've been reading Hollywood on the Couch by Stephen Farber and Marc Green. "A candid look at the overheated love affair between psychiatrists and moviemakers." Psychoanalysis was really really big among celebrities. Woody Allen was pretty average in that regard although he may have stuck with it longer than most.

It made me wonder if that was my problem. If rich successful celebrities go for psychoanalysis, it must be good. It's shocking how many actors, writers, directors and producers are named in the book, and a little disturbing that this private medical information was public knowledge. I started thinking maybe I should go for psychoanalysis. It's expensive, outdated, and I don't like the idea of "transference". To quote Wikipedia:

In a therapy context, transference refers to redirection of a patient's feelings for a significant person to the therapist. Transference is often manifested as an erotic attraction towards a therapist, but can be seen in many other forms such as rage, hatred, mistrust, parentification, extreme dependence, or even placing the therapist in a god-like or guru status.

And I realized that I was no better than people who think Scientology must be helpful because Tom Cruise is in it.