Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

Set in 1955. I read that it was based loosely on the case of a German actress named Sybille Schmitz. 

About a washed up Nazi-era German movie star. She meets and starts sleeping with a newspaper sports reporter who wants to write an article on actors in her shoes. He discovers that she's being "treated" by a doctor who keeps her hooked on morphine so she can exploit her wealth. These things happen in a country full of "former" Nazis.

I looked up Sybille Schmitz on Wikipedia and surprised at how closely the movie followed her story. They kept saying it was "loosely" based on her but it wasn't as "loose" as I assumed.

In black & white. With a surprising amount of American country music. 

I've been looking at IMDb as I watch movies and have noticed how fleeting movie careers can be. Actors should prepare emotionally for having their careers grind to a halt.

I looked Sybille Schmitz up on IMDb and was surprised that I've seen three of her movies, G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), a silent movie starring Louise Brooks, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) and the Nazi version of Titanic (1943). 

Veronika Voss and Vampyr and maybe some others are available on The Criterion Channel.

I sent a man to prison

I had jury duty. I'd been called a few times before but I wasn't needed. One time I completely forgot about it and didn't show up. I guess they didn't need me that time, either, since there didn't seem to be a warrant out for my arrest. But, this time, they put me on a jury.

A 44-year-old man was charged with punching his girlfriend or former girlfriend who was also the mother of his two children. He had pounded on her bedroom door shouting obscene abuse at her. Their 11-year-old daughter was in her room directly across the hall so she heard all this, heard her mother cry out in pain and testified at the trial.

The defense didn't really challenge the victim or her daughter in cross-examination. The only defense witness, a retired doctor who now worked as a paid witness, testified that the bruise the victim suffered couldn't be from the defendant punching her because there was yellow around it, and that, according to a medical journal article published in the 1990's, took at lease 18 hours to form.

The prosecutor cross-examined the doctor and read from multiple medical journal articles which said that it was impossible to tell how old a bruise was, especially from a photograph where the color may not be accurate. 

A question is not evidence, so I wasn't sure how to regard the stuff the prosecutor was reading, but the doctor's only response was to accuse him of taking the quotes out of context. Which was true----quotes or excerpts are out of context by definition. The only question he really answered was whether it was possible to cause a bruise on top of another bruise. It was.

The doctor didn't seem that good, but I was reminded of the kindly old MD who testified on Paul Newman's side in The Verdict. I didn't doubt him, did I?

The defense rested. The prosecution called a rebuttal witness, a child abuse pediatrician. Child abuse cases were his specialty. Bruises, sadly, were his bread and butter. 

He was familiar with the study the other doctor cited. He said that information was no longer considered valid. Even the researcher who wrote it changed his mind. There is no way to tell how old a bruise was especially by looking at a photograph.

The defense attorney didn't give up. He began reading things from medical journals about bruising and asked the witness to confirm they were correct. I don't think the things he read had much to do with telling the age of a bruise, but he didn't think the jury would know that.

It made me think of the movie Trial and Error, aka Dock Brief. Peter Sellers plays a failed British lawyer who can't think of a reasonable defense for wife-killer Richard Attenborough so he makes no defense at all. In this case, the defense had been hopelessly crushed, but he didn't give up.

There was also a resisting arrest charge, him shouting obscenities at the cops and spitting on their shoes, which doesn't seem that bad. They had bodycam footage of everything and of the police talking to the victim. There was video of a long interview with the daughter about a month later.

We convicted the guy. The judge came back and talked to us when it was over. He was an old guy, completely bald. I didn't notice until then that he had an earring. He complained about the massive amount of bruise-related evidence. He had to read all the articles mentioned in the trial. He also told us that the defendant was already on probation for strangling the victim, he had been convicted of assaulting her before that and there had been a restraining order against him. Because of all that and the fact that he assaulted her in earshot of their child, he was facing up to five years in prison.

I had been worried about it. I didn't want to make a mistake and convict someone who didn't do it or acquit someone because I didn't know what reasonable doubt was, and even if he was guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, did I want to be the one to put him in the slam? Now I'm a little disturbed at how easy it was. 

The Childhood of a Leader (2015)

I didn't get the cause and effect relationship between the kid's childhood at the end of World War One and his growing up to be a fascist leader. The child in this movie has long hair, wears frilly clothes and people keep mistaking him for a girl. In this regard, he's more like a little Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt than Hitler. The movie is based on a story by Jean-Paul Sartre. I don't know what he was trying to say. I'm surprised that Sartre thought the kid saying he didn't believe in prayer made him a future Nazi. The kid was American, the son of an American diplomat. How did he end up as a Nazi-like dictator riding around in a Mercedes? It would probably have been a better movie if it had cut the ending where we see him as an adult.

I watched it on The Criterion Channel.

Franklin Roosevelt as child.

It reminded me of what Nabokov said about Sartre and Camus, that their novels' existentialist themes were tacked on rather than being the natural outcome of the story. I don't know how closely this movie stuck to Sartre's story, but the dictator thing was definitely tacked on at the end.

Ordinary People (1980)

I watched Ordinary People for the first time in four years. My reaction to it was different from last time. I had less sympathy for the rich people in it, not because they were rich but because the parents encouraged their sons to engage in dangerous but expensive hobbies, like sailing in a tiny sailboat. Even when one son dies in a boating accident, it didn't occur to them that it was a bad idea.

The surviving son blames himself for his brother's death and goes to a psychologist played by Judd Hirsch. The psychologist might have pointed out that his parents bought them the boat and didn't seem to have bothered with life jackets. 

In the Italian movie Son's Room (2001), an Italian psychologist's son dies in an accident. The father blames his patient. He was going to go jogging with his son that day but instead had to help a patient overcome his stagefright before a public speaking event. Since he wasn't going jogging, the son goes scuba diving with predictable results. 

This is what happens when rich people have "active lifestyles". 

I've written about this more than once, but I had a great uncle born in the 1880's. He was half Indian and had an uncanny ability to walk through the woods and find his way in total darkness. The trick is to look up at the stars. You can see where the trees are that way. But he had a terrible fear of going into the woods alone. 

One of his sons was about 6o when he got a degree in anthropology. I was at his graduation party and he was talking with guests about Indian lore, like what parts of a human body are left after being eaten by a bear. Nature is horrible. Horrible. But you have these rich people who go out there like they own the place, oblivious to the dangers.

I don't like being anywhere that I can't get an ambulance.

Claude Jarman, Jr, (1934 - 2025)

I missed the news that Claude Jarman died January 12th at age 90.  When he was ten, a director visited his school in Nashville looking for a kid to star in The Yearling, spotted Claude in the hallway hanging drawings if I remember correctly, and POW! Instant movie star! It shows the advantage of being a child actor. You're competing with other children who have no more experience than you do. It's why I'm pro-child acting. He received a special Oscar for that performance. His last acting role was in the mini-series Centennial in 1978. I remember him among past Oscar winners in the 2003 Academy Awards.

Jarman later became executive director of the San Francisco Film Festival and was executive producer of rock concert documentary Fillmore (1972) and was manager of the San Francisco Opera House.

The Woodchipper Massacre (1988)

I was surprised to see this on Tubi. I had rented it somewhere long ago. Made for $400, but that was in 1988 so it was more like $1,000 today. It may have cost more than El Mariachi if you subtract the cost of film and processing for the that movie and adjust for inflation.

Shot on S-VHS.

Jim McBride's first movie. 

A father goes out of town and leaves his three children with an aged babysitter. The kids are 13 to 22. They accidentally kill the babysitter and dispose of her body in a woodchipper. Then her violent ex-convict son comes looking for her. Not much of a "massacre" really.

Picture quality isn't good. Sounds like they used the camcorder's built-in mic. The actors bellow out their lines. Maybe they were used to appearing on stage.

You know how the old PXL-2000 camcorders are coveted by artists and hipsters? I don't know why I find the S-VHS aesthetic so much less appealing.

Not much blood and no gore which is fine with me.

Tubi also has Cannibal Campout (1988) and Feeders (1996) both the normal and the Rifftrax version, from the same auteur.

See how Jaws distorted everything?

Remember the trailer for Jaws? Richard Dreyfuss says, "That's a twenty footer."

Robert Shaw says "Twenty-five."

Well, now they're reporting that they've caught a massive, record-breaking gigantic great white shark, the largest ever caught tagged and released in the Atlantic ocean. I thought maybe it was thirty or forty feet. No. It was fourteen feet. Fourteen lousy feet. 

I knew the shark in Jaws was unusually large. I didn't know it was absurdly large.

Fright (UK, 1971) Susan George, Honor Blackman

Honor Blackman's going out for the evening with her husband. College girl Susan George, walking from the bus stop through the woods around their mansion, comes to babysit their two-year-old. Susan George's boyfriend comes over and they make out. At the restaurant, Honor Blackman learns that her son's dangerously deranged biological father has escaped from the mental hospital. The parents try to rush home but are delayed. Their friend goes to the cops but it takes them a while to see what the problem is. British police don't really shoot people so even when they show up their options are limited. 

It was well-made. Honor Blackman is strangely nervous about leaving the child with a sitter, like she was afraid this would happen.

Believed to be the premiere babysitter vs psychotic killer movie.  

Honor Blackman said she was worried about the toddler being traumatized by the filming of the violent scenes, but it was the director's son and he was willing to risk it.

Free on Tubi.

Rough Night in Jericho (1967)

Hollywood western, violent but didn't seem to be influenced by spaghetti westerns or Samurai movies. The interiors were too brightly lit. Dean Martin as a lawman gone bad. He and his gang rule over the town of Jericho with an iron fist, claiming 51% ownership of all the businesses. He's trying to get control of the stagecoach line owned by widow Jean Simmons. George Peppard, an itinerate gambler, decides to help her.

Slim Pickens attacks George Peppard with a bullwhip. There's one lynching and Dean Martin keeps talking about hanging people. Just not that good. 

Trump

Well, that thing I wrote about Trump, how it wouldn't be so hard, how we could sweat it out the next four years, was wrong, obviously. The Zionists did stop bombing Gaza, but the same thing happened when Obama took office. Israel was in the middle of a bombing campaign which killed thousands. Because it stopped just before he was inaugurated, Obama could pretend it never happened. 

I don't think anything's going to change in Ukraine. Everything will get worse and worse in the U.S. Trump will speed up the collapse of the American Empire which is okay with me. The U.S. is now an existential threat to Canada and Denmark. He says he wants to turn Gaza into the Riviera of the middle east----why doesn't he just demand that France hand over the actual Riviera?

There was a Vietnamese writer who said that anti-imperialists living in imperialist countries got the best of both worlds. They got the benefits of imperialism but also got to be self-righteous about it. He was right to a point, but I don't think moral superiority does you any good. Now half the country, everyone who didn't vote for Trump, can experience it. It doesn't make up for anything.

Ricky Schroder: Saying stupid things

For some reason, I was thinking back to the time forty years ago that I saw Ricky Schroder on the Merv Griffin Show. He must have been 10 or 11. [Turns out he was 14 or 15.] Bea Arthur was there. 

Schroder told an embarrassing anecdote. He had been in Japan to promote a movie. He was introduced to a Japanese official. Trying to make conversation, the man asked the little fellow what his favorite movie was. Without thinking, Schroder answered "Attack on Pearl Harbor". 

I assume he meant Tora! Tora! Tora! If he did it was actually a pretty good answer. That movie was a U.S.-Japanese co-production, an example of cooperation and friendship between our nations. It showed he had no hard feelings and the movie was a huge hit in Japan which must be a little disturbing to some people. 

Schroder now calls himself "Rick Schroder". He's some sort of violent alt-right nut. He's been arrested twice for domestic violence but not charged and he put up $150 thousand to bail out murderous fellow German Kyle Rittenhouse. Millionaire Schroder posted a video of himself harassing Costco employees because the store required masks during the pandemic.

Just watched a video about the video. He's not aging well, poor wretch. The great big glasses aren't doing him any favors. There's video of him apologizing for the Costco video, but, in it, he laments the end of the white supremacist regime in Rhodesia. 

Soapbox Derby (UK, 1958)

A gang of boys called the Battersea Bats are in competition with the Victoria Victors who are trying to steal their plans for a soap box derby racer. Produced by the Children's Film Foundation. The children probably shouldn't have been playing in a rail depot, but when a member of the rival gang falls into the sea during a gang fight, they rush to rescue him. Children in the audience learn an important lesson about not committing manslaughter. In another scene, they explain why children who wear glasses are called "four eyes". A little girl gets hit by a truck and is taken away in a weird-looking British ambulance. 

Michael Crawford's first movie. His grandfather in the film drives a tiny BMW Isetta. It has only a slightly longer wheelbase than the soap box racers.

I thought soap box derby racers just rolled downhill propelled only by gravity, but England is pretty flat. The things these kids build were pedal-driven. 

I had never heard of the movie before, but it was reportedly shown on the CBS Children's Film Festival on Saturday morning TV.

Free on Movieland.Tv or the Classic Comedy Channel or with a subscription on BFIplayer Classics.

Only 64 minutes, but it has a lot of plot.

The Love God? (Don Knotts, 1969)

Covers some of the same territory as The Seven Minutes. There's a short obscenity trial.

Don Knotts stars as Abner Audubon Peacock IV who publishes a failing birdwatching magazine. It is saved from bankruptcy by a pornographic magazine publisher (Edmond O'Brien) who wants it for its 4th Class Mailing Permit.

Abner becomes known as a pornographer. He's shunned by his community. He had been a scout leader. Now parents shield their children from him. He is about to commit suicide when a couple guys from an ACLU-like organization offer to defend him in court from obscenity charges.

My older brother and sister wanted to go to this in 1969, but our parents wouldn't let them because it was rated PG. In fairness to my parents, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was made the same year, was rated PG and had a nude scene and a teacher molesting a student. When Gone with the Wind was re-released in the '60s it got a G-rating and it was a bloody war movie with implied nudity, implied marital rape, slavery, prostitution, the horrible death of a horse, a man having his leg amputated without anesthesia and a dead body dragged across the floor leaving a long bloody smear, all in technicolor. Ratings had entirely different meanings back then.

According to Wikipedia, The Love God? is now rated PG-13.

Now that I've seen the movie, I can tell you my parents were right. I don't know why I found it so disturbing.

Don Knotts isn't the blowhard he is in his other movies. The Mafia has taken control of the magazine and he's forced to become a bizarre Hugh Hefner-like figurehead for the publication. He goes back to his old girlfriend waiting for him in their small town. Before they can marry, her father, a pastor, insists that he call a press conference and tell the world the truth, that he is a virgin. Knotts is horrified but sees no way out. 

It was a failed attempt to put Don Knotts in a comedy aimed at adults. Sadly, the public didn't go for it. If it had, Knotts might have been the poor man's Woody Allen. 

Free on Movieland.Tv and Amazon Prime.

The Seven Minutes (Russ Meyer, 1971)

Courtroom drama about an obscenity trial over a novel called The Seven Minutes. 

Russ Meyer thought courtroom dramas were dull so he livened it up but editing it down to short takes and making it fast-moving. It was still long at an hour and fifty-five minutes. It became a bit of a mystery as the defense attorney tries to find the true author of the novel.

I saw it on TV when I was in high school. We had cable but didn't have any pay channels. It may have been on the Canadian channel. I didn't know anything about it or Russ Meyer. I somehow noticed the editing. I remember being impressed by it, but the arguments against censorship seemed pretty standard.

Tom Selleck and John Carradine were the only actors I recognized. 

A prosecutor up for re-election sets out to prosecute a bookstore for selling a high brow sex novel. The defense is at a terrible disadvantage during the trial. I don't know how realistic this is. I read Howl of the Censor which was mostly a transcript of the obscenity trial of City Lights Books over the publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. The judge had to tell courtroom observers not to laugh at prosecution witnesses and the prosecution struggled to make any points. The work had to be judged as a whole so he couldn't single out the dirty parts, he could raise doubts about the literary merit of the poem as a whole but couldn't raise doubts by pointing out the unintelligible parts, and that trial was in 1957.

The prosecutor and the defense attorney confront each other in the parking garage once the trial is over. The defense lawyer with his Volkswagen bug and the prosecutor in his big giant Chrysler Imperial. They each swear that they'll continue the fight for or against censorship. At least they were sincere.

The movie failed at the box office. Apparently, audiences expected something different from Russ Meyer. He went back to independent film after this.

Based on the novel by Irving Wallace.

It appears to be available only on Moveland.Tv.

The Magic Christian (1969) Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr

Just awful. Supposed to be a satire about greed, I guess. Billionaire Peter Sellers adopts homeless Ringo Starr and, something. A series of random gags. They bribe people and make them do "funny" things or get reactions from them. They buy a painting at auction for thirty thousand pounds then cut out the nose with a pair of scissors. At the auction, people bid in what were supposed to be funny ways.

Let's see. They hunt quail using anti-aircraft guns. They open a small grocery store, have a grand opening sale, everything so cheap that shoppers quickly clear the place out and the place shuts down. Peter Sellers buys a hotdog from a vendor out the window of a passenger train. He pays with a five pound note. The vendor says he can't make change for it and runs alongside the train as it moves out trying to get a smaller bill. I don't know what the point of that was since the guy was the opposite of greedy.

Laurence Harvey appears on stage as Hamlet and starts doing a strip tease in the middle of his soliloquy. 

Includes documentary footage of a Vietnamese man being shot in the head by a South Vietnamese officer. I'm sure they thought that would get a big laugh, although, in fairness, Woody Allen used the same image in Stardust Memories.

On an ocean liner called The Magic Christian, passengers watch a movie about a transracial head transplant. Yul Brenner appears as a female impersonator, Christopher Lee as a waiter who turns out to be a vampire. A man in a gorilla suit attacks the captain.

Not one funny thing. But I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and was shocked that a few critics liked it.

I remember seeing short bits of this thing on TV in the '70's. I was a kid. My older brother laughed mirthlessly at it. Maybe it was because he liked Ringo, or maybe he was trying to show he understood the joke even if it wasn't funny. I thought I was too unsophisticated to see the humor.

With John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Roman Polanski's in the credits but I didn't spot him. I probably stopped paying much attention by then. 

Free on Zoneify, Classico, Momentu and Movieland.Tv. You have to pay to see it on Amazon Prime or Apple TV.

Try and Get Me aka The Sound of Fury (Cy Endfield,1950)

Inspired by actual events. There was a kidnapping and murder in California in 1933 which ended with a lynch mob murdering the accused killers. The victim in the kidnapping was a friend of former child star Jackie Coogan who participated in the lynching. 

Out of work and down on his luck with a child and a pregnant wife, normally law-abiding husband (Frank Lovejoy) becomes Lloyd Bridges' getaway driver on a series of robberies.

Lloyd Bridges jumps into a really nice convertible with a wealthy youth. He abducts him, murders him while Lovejoy pleads for the rich guy's life. They demand a ransom from the victim's father.

Reportedly, Martin Scorsese owned the only known 35mm print left of this movie. He allowed it to be used to restore the film.

You feel for the poor guy desperate for income, then distraught about being involved in a murder. A local newspaper columnist (Richard Carlson) innocently whips the community into a murderous rage. A lot of guilt-stricken people in this thing.

I watched it the day after Trump pardoned members of the mob who attacked the capitol intent on lynching Mike Pence. 

Directed by Cy Endfield a year before he headed for England to escape the blacklist. He went on to direct Zulu among other things. 

You know who should have gotten a supporting role? Jackie Coogan.

Free on Movieland.Tv, Local Now and Crime and Mystery. Available for $3.99 on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.

Sudden Terror aka Eyewitness (UK 1970) Mark Lester, Susan George

Filmed in Malta but I'm not sure if it was set there. A boy-who-cried-wolf story. Mark Lester as Ziggy. He has an over-active imagination. His sister (Susan George) and his grandfather (Lionel Jeffries) don't believe him when he sees a couple of cops assassinate a visiting head of state. The killers see him, too, and are trying to find him so they can murder him.

The kid's grandfather is one of those retired British Army officers who dresses for dinner in his ridiculous dress uniform. Do guys like that exist? Still, I liked it when he karate kicks a cop down the stairs and shoots him with his own gun. I don't know why I like seeing the elderly kill people. 

So many innocent by-standers die in this thing, including one child, it would have been less of a loss to humanity if they had just killed Ziggy. But Mark Lester was a surprisingly big star back then. 

Free on Moveland.Tv. Doesn't seem to be available anywhere else.

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968)

Peter Sellers plays square attorney Harold Fine. We see him driving around a parking garage in his huge Lincoln Continental. It had to have been murder trying to park that thing, but I don't think that was the point. 

I don't know if this is common knowledge anymore, but Alice B. Toklas was Gertrude Stein's girlfriend for years. In 1954, she published the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, as much memoir as recipe book. It included a recipe for hashish fudge. In the movie, a hippie girl makes cannabis brownies which Sellers unwittingly serves his fiancee (Joyce Van Patten) and his parents when they drop in on him.

At their wedding, Harold panics and leaves Joyce Van Patten at the altar. He becomes a hippie but wisely keeps his Lincoln. He has ridiculous-looking long hair like in What's New, Pussycat.

In one scene, Sellers laughs uncontrollably when a conservative-looking man comes into a hippie clothing store and buys a dress for himself, but that was while Sellers' character was still a square. Although, once he becomes a hippie, he tells his new girlfriend not to hitchhike, or to only take rides from women, and, he adds, "make sure she's not a dyke".  An odd line in a movie where they keep playing the theme song with the line, "I love you Alice B. Toklas/and so did Gertrude Stein."

Free on Movieland.Tv or a channel called "Classico". $2.99 on other channels.

They Might Be Giants (1971) George C. Scott, Joanne Woodward

They used to show this on TV when I was a kid. I never understood it. George C. Scott as a judge whose wife died a year earlier. Since then, he believed he was Sherlock Holmes. He has no memory of anything that happened more than a year ago. There's no sense that his wife's death was especially tragic or that he was distraught over it, but that may just be because he has no memory of it.

Other characters include a mental patient who won't speak because he wants to be Rudoph Valentino in a silent movie. Jack Gilford imagines himself as The Scarlet Pimpernel. I guess the idea was that debilitating mental illness was a harmless escape from reality.

Nothing in it was funny.

Joanne Woodward as psychiatrist Dr. Watson. 

With Rue McClanahan just a year before Maude. Al Lewis five years after The Munsters. 

Part of the problem might have been that Sherlock Holmes was a detective. He sets nothing in motion. All he does is follow clues left by other people and there's nothing for him to investigate, although his brother is trying to get rid of him in order to take control of his fortune, but the judge is oblivious to it.

Joanne Woodward committed a number of what must have been ethical violations, like when she invites George C. Scott over for dinner.

Free on Movieland.Tv. 

A better movie along vaguely similar lines might be Gumshoe with Albert Finney as a neurotic who likes acting like a hardboiled detective. He also has a conflict with his brother. And it turns out there was an actual crime to be solved.  Free on a channel called Momentu, for $3.99 elsewhere.

Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr, 2023)

Realistically, how distressed should you be if you can't find your mother during a family gathering? She hadn't been gone long. No reason to think anything happened. It might not seem ominous if it weren't in a movie.

In Texas, a wealthy extended family gathers for a Christmas portrait. We see them milling around with Santa hats. They get word that a young relative has died unexpectedly, then their elderly mother can't be found. Only one of her daughters is concerned. She has a flight to catch with her Polish boyfriend and wants to get the photo taken but no one else is worried.

You probably don't see that many arthouse films set in Texas. 

Free on Tubi. 

Spielberg's Minority Report (2002)

A couple of critics pointed out the hypocrisy of this film. We see how intrusive advertising has become in the future in a movie that was full of product placements. The villain used the death of Tom Cruise's son to manipulate him in a movie that uses that death to manipulate the audience. 

I thought it was a little weird that the movie opens with Tom Cruise stopping a man from murdering his wife when he catches her in bed with another man. In The Fabelmans, it was Spielberg's mother's adultery that caused his parents' divorce. Was Spielberg saying something about his parents? Probably not, although Spielberg has never shut up about their divorce and has now made a whole movie about it.  

With the help of three psychics kept floating in a pool of water, police prevent future murders but then take the would-be murderers away and freeze them. Their children can't even visit them in prison. Isn't that as disruptive to society as the murders they prevent? Instead of raiding the house and dragging the husband away, couldn't they have raided the place a few minutes earlier and told the wife to cheese it because her husband was coming? Maybe they could have gotten the couple into counseling or told the husband what his wife was up to and gotten him a lawyer or told his wife her husband might kill her and gotten her into divorce court.

I read the Secret Service/FBI report on school shootings. They emphasized that the goal was to prevent shootings, not make arrests. They even listed kids who had been stopped in the planning stages of mass shootings who went on to live happy, productive lives.

With some drawn out chase scenes with special effects/stunts. I haven't seen any superhero movies but I imagine that's what they're like. In one chase, Tom Cruise knocks some workers off a scaffolding, presumably to their deaths. Maybe this thing would have interested me if I believed in psychics.