NYPD Blue (1993-2005)

Couldn't find a picture of them torturing anyone.

My brother-in-law has been watching this a lot, alternating between it and similar cop shows. Maybe it would be better of you only saw it once a week, because every episode is the same. It's like Columbo, but instead of annoying the person they've latched onto as a suspect, they threaten and beat them until they give what, realistically, would likely be a false confession. Where we are now in the series, one main character is going to either die, get a heart transplant or both. I say good riddance to him. I know he's a fictional character in show that went off the air twenty years ago, but I hope he dies a horrible death. 

So I've been watching several of these shows on streaming video, Law & Order, Law & Order SVU and I think a couple of others. I keep encouraging my brother-in-law to throw in a few Dragnets to cleanse the palate. Even in the '50's when American police routinely tortured people, when they violated people's rights constantly, Joe Friday and his partners were polite and sometimes sympathized with the miserable wretches they were sending to prison or to the gas chamber. They were much kinder to juvenile delinquents than TV cops today.

Dragnet episodes were based on real cases. I hear you can sometimes find them online if you look at the death penalty cases. There was one episode where I recognized the crime, but that was on the radio show. They really toned down the ghastly child murder that happened in 1924. Some episodes had things you wouldn't expect to see on 1950s television or in the '60's or '70's. There was a cross-dressing hitchhiker who killed a few motorists in the '50's and a defrocked nun defending the crimes of her serial rapist/murderer brother in one of the color episodes. 

Law & Order SVU stars Jayne Mansfield's daughter. NYPD Blue had Dom DeLuise's son playing Dennis Franz's son.

Lalo Schifrin RIP

Lalo Schifrin has died at age 93. I heard that he met Bruce Lee when he wrote the music for Enter the Dragon. Lee told he would listen to his Mission Impossible theme while working out. Composed the music for such films as Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Cool Hand Luke. When I was a kid I was surprised when my brother's high school stage band performed Shifrin's theme to Mannix. And there was this:

Mel Brooks' Oscar-winning short

Mel Brooks' Oscar-winning short, 1963.

A Legend or Was It? (Japan, 1963) directed by Keisuke Kinoshita

AKA, The Legend of a Duel to the Death.

From the director of Yotsuya Kaiden. A Japanese family from Tokyo had to relocate to a rural area during World War Two. The war is coming to its conclusion. A number of local boys had been killed. The family's son, Hideyuki (Go Kato), returns home from the army lucky enough to be discharged due to illness. His sister is engaged to the son of the local mayor who got out of the war after being wounded. Hideyuki tells his sister not to marry him because he was a war criminal---a rapist and a murderer. Naturally, the mayor's son gets his fundoshi in a bunch, begins spreading rumors about the family, destroys their crops and finally tries to rape the girl. Her sister hits him over the head with a rock, accidentally killing him which results in the locals forming a lynch mob.

This one could be remade as a western. They could even use the same soundtrack. People there seem to all own shotguns. 

It also made me think of those movies about Northerners who travel into the rural South and end up fighting for their lives, or movies like Diary of a Country Priest where French villages turn out to be full of horrible people.   

Available on The Criterion Channel. In color.

Yotsuya Kaidan, Parts One and Two (Japan, 1949)

Based on a Kabuki ghost story from 1825, but this version toned it down. There's no actual ghost, just a husband's guilty conscience. A strange, complex plot about an unemployed samurai, his clingy wife, her look-alike sister and a couple of ex-convicts. There's blackmail and murder. I thought it would be a big soap opera, and it was to a point, but I found it hard to get into.

I watch samurai movies and thought I finally got used to the horrible historical Japanese hairstyles---the samurai would shave the top of their heads for some reason. But, in this movie, both men and women had awful elaborate hairdos I just couldn't reconcile myself to.   

Had a samurai in it but wasn't exactly a samurai movie. You couldn't really remake it as a western although it might be interesting if someone tried.

Available on the Criterion Channel. They also have a more recent movie apparently based on the same story. 

"Youth of the World" (Nazi Germany, 1936)

The "youth" of the world in 1936 looked really old. This was a restored version of a film of the 1936 Winter Olympics. The German alpine towns would have looked pretty nice if they hadn't had Nazi flags flying here and there. Hitler, Goebbels and Goring appear nine or ten  years before their eventual suicides. I kept thinking of Death Race 2000, David Carradine intent on winning the race so he could shake hands with the country's leader and blow him up. 

I don't watch the Olympics or sports of any kind, so I don't know, but my impression was that Olympians back then would have been no match for even middling athletes today. We see them lumbering around on their skis with their receding hairlines and sagging features.

But it was nicely filmed. Interesting to watch. No narration, but an occasional superimposed title.  

38 minutes. Available on the Criterion Channel.

Something about Project Greenlight victim, Jason Mann

I check the internet when I think of it for news on Jason Mann, the "winner" in the final season of Project Greenlight, the only one I watched. I heard he worked as a second unit director or something for Peter Farrelly, but that hasn't appeared in his credits on IMDb. 

I did come across this bit of information: 

...He is also an accomplished cinematographer and editor, as with Radical Wolfe based on an article by Michael Lewis (The Big Short, Moneyball), featuring narration by Jon Hamm, named by Variety as one of the Best Documentaries of 2023, now on Netflix.

From Jason Mann | The Black List 

This isn't listed in his credits on IMDb either. No telling what else he's been doing. I figured he was working on TV commercials or industrial films, but how would I know.