Maps to the Stars (2014) David Cronenberg

This was the first movie Canadian director David Cronenberg filmed (partially) in Los Angeles. All his earlier movies were shot in Canada and the UK. Maps to the Stars comes across as an attack on Hollywood but I don't know if it really was since the people in it had issues you can't blame on the movie industry. There was  middle-aged actress Havana (Julianne Moore). She had been sexually abused by her mother, a great movie star who died fairly young. Havana wants to star in a remake of a movie her mother had gotten an Oscar nomination for, and now she's having hallucinations. She sees her mother in a bathtub saying terrible things to her. 

And there was Benji (Evan Bird), an exceptionally bratty 13-year-old star. He has a dangerously mentally ill sister who had just been released from a sanitarium. His parents didn't know that their marriage was incestuous until it was too late. The poor kid's a recovering drug addict and is starting to hallucinate himself. 

We see Benji hanging around in clubs with other tween celebrities, the girls referring to an actress in her early 20's as "menopausal" and a teen idol who tells about his sewage being stolen by the teamster charged with maintaining his trailer and sold to a deranged fan.

Evan Bird was great in this movie, but he hasn't appeared in anything since. Maybe it turned him off to show business. The scene in this that stood out to me was Benji hanging around at his friend's house. He unloads the family revolver and starts playing with it. He puts it to his head a couple of times and pulls the trigger. We saw him unload it, but you know nothing good can come of this.

With Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattison and John Cusack.

Available on The Criterion Channel, or you can pay a few bucks to see it on Prime, Apple TV or Fandango.

Gotti (2018) John Travolta, Spencer LoFranco

I probably held it to a different standard since I saw it on TV, but that's the only way anyone's going to see it. I didn't think it was terrible, just a straight telling of what a monster John Gotti was. I don't know what people wanted from it. We see him in prison still browbeating his family. We see him murder people. Nothing glaringly wrong with the movie but I can see why people didn't go for it.

I watched it because one of the stars, Spencer LoFranco who played Gotti's son, just died at 33, poor devil. Gotti was his last movie. I don't know if its failure sent him spiraling into drug addiction. He was pulling himself back together when he died. He had face tattoos removed and was going to take another stab at acting.

Free on Prime, Pluto, Tubi, Roku Channel, and Fawesome.

Timothee Chalamet, Adam Sandler

Timothee Chalamet is dating a Kardashian and now he says that Adam Sandler is “ONE OF THE BEST FUCKING ACTORS OF ALL TIME!" I guess it's all subjective. I don't really watch anything with Adam Sandler, so I may have misjudged him and I've seen Chalamet in a few things and never saw what the big deal was. I understand why people like him, but why do they like him so much?  If you're going to state an opinion that will make you look stupid, don't use the word "fucking". He's pushing 30.

Flying Disk Man From Mars (1950)

It sounded interesting, an early UFO movie, but it turned out to be a serial. Had bad fist fights that drag on and on in every episode. Some of the cars looked beautiful, but they had these chases with guys driving while shooting at each other. Communists from Mars are out to dominate the Earth. Criminals use this as a front for their smuggling operation. The picture quality was really good.

Free on Tubi.

Rust (2024) Alec Baldwin, Patrick Scott McDermott,

I was curious about the movie. I wanted to see it, but I didn't want to spend $6 to watch it on Roku. How did I get so cheap? I looked it up online. $6 today is equal to $2 in 1985, and in 1985 I'd have cheerfully spent two bucks to see it on lousy quality VHS.  

If what I read in one review is correct, Halyna Hutchin's son will only receive compensation for his mother's death when the movie turns a profit. Assuming she was an employee and not an "independent contractor", the family would get something from Workman's Comp and the kid would get Social Security survivor benefits, but, according to critic Susan Granger: 

In 2022, Halyna’s widower Matthew settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the film’s producers, who were protected by an LLC listing only one thing of value: the movie. That resulted in his billing as one of the executive producers, and their son Andros will receive profits from the film. But inevitably, ‘creative’ bookkeeping will determine how much that is.

So I paid to see it on Amazon Prime.

Far better than I expected. It was over two hours but didn't seem overlong. It looked beautiful and it was infinitely better than other recent low budget westerns I've seen. It was violent enough and it proves that there's nothing wrong with digital muzzle flashes and smoke instead of firing blanks. It's a shame they didn't do that in the first place. 

Rust himself was kind of a jerk. He pistol whips his tween grandson and carries him out of the jail instead of just telling him he was there to save him from being hanged. 

People keep comparing it to spaghetti westerns but I didn't see the similarity. I didn't know how I'd feel about Alec Baldwin in a western, but he was fine, the kid, Patrick Scott McDermott, was good. The beginning of the movie with the two orphaned boys struggling to survive on a primitive farm was depressing enough that accidentally killing a man, being sentenced to death and fleeing into the countryside was really the best thing for that poor kid.

In this age of streaming video, it was very clever giving the movie such a short title, only four letters that were all next to each other in the alphabet. Searching for it on Roku was almost effortless.

There's a scene in a town where there's a sign that says "Joe Souza Trading Post". The movie was directed by Joel Souza. Maybe he shouldn't have done that.

I didn't find the two brawling hog farming brothers funny, but they didn't annoy me the way they did some critics. 

Bones and All, Timothee Chalamet, 2022

Bones and All, Timothee Chalamet's teen cannibalism movie, is now showing on The Criterion Channel. I turned it off at the start of the first big cannibalism scene. A few seconds of that was enough. The movie got a long, standing ovation at a classy European film festival. Why would anyone watch that? Couldn't they just show people eating pot roast and say it was human? 

A better cannibalism movie was Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain (1959) about Japanese soldiers in The Philippines. I assumed the cannibalism was allegorical, then I saw The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987), a documentary about a former Japanese soldier who survived the allied invasion of New Guinea. He wanted to find out what happened to his friend who, it turned out, was murdered and eaten by Japanese officers when their food ran out.

The Criterion Channel keeps showing crap. For a while they had posted the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and they showed a couple pornographic movies made during a brief period when that sort of thing was considered "chic". 

Boardinghouse (1982) Death Park: The Beginning (2021), Death Park: The End (2021)

Boardinghouse (1982)

Shot on video---VHS according to Indiewire, but that may not be true. They had U-Matic video back then which had a better picture. Camcorders didn't have flying eraser heads then, so they didn't have clean cuts between shots. So you had to edit which meant loss of image quality.

Because it was shot in somebody's house reportedly on VHS, I assumed it was terribly cheap, and it was. The estimated budget was $10,000 according to imdb.com, but that was over $30,000 today. They spent far more than that to make a tape-to-film transfer to release it to theaters.

Movies that cheap today are made today without paying anyone, so I was surprised by the amount of nudity. It doesn't seem like actors should do that for free.  

Horror movie, somewhat bloody, had a gore scene with pig's intestines.

Death Park: The Beginning (2021), Death Park: The End (2021).

Made for $180, according to IMDb. Another site said $680. I would quip that I wondered where all the money went, but that wouldn't be true. They had a large cast, a couple of topless scenes, quite a bit of presumably fake blood and a number of simple practical effects. I had the feeling it was made for Community Access TV, but there was nothing to indicate that.

Not much to it. People go into a park and a man in a Donald Trump mask murders them with a knife. 

They always cut to another shot before the stabbing. It goes from the guy beginning to plunge the knife in the victim's direction, then it cuts to a shot of the knife stuck in them. It's nice that the unpaid cast was never in any danger. Although I hear you can get workman's comp on unpaid volunteers, so an on-the-job injury could have been their only hope of being paid. There was a scene where a woman flees the killer but trips over a rope the killer stretched across the trail and this was also accomplished through editing. I'm at a stage of life where I would consider lying down on the ground a stunt.

So, it was all right. It seems like they could have taken greater advantage of the truly low budget. They were free to do whatever they wanted plot-wise. They had almost nothing to lose. 

All three movies are free on Tubi.

John Bolton

I just know "liberals" will now sympathize with him.

From Counterpunch.com:

On Thursday, John Bolton was indicted for sharing classified documents. Here’s what he said 15 years ago about Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning for doing the same:

Q. What do you think of Bradley Manning?

Bolton: I think he committed treason. I think he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Q. What does that mean?

Bolton: Well, treason is the only crime defined by our Constitution. It says that treason consists only of levying war against the United States or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. And he gave our enemies a lot of aid and comfort.

Q. So what should happen to him?

Bolton: He should be prosecuted and if he’s found guilty he should be punished to the fullest extent possible.

Q. And what is that?

Bolton: Death.

Q. You think he should be killed?

Bolton: Yes.

 

As always, I was disappointed Bolton turned himself in instead of making a run for it. Why don't these people ever make a run for it?

 

Top Gun (1955) Sterling Hayden

Yes, this is a different Top Gun, a 1955 western. I was intrigued for some reason by the review on the Once Upon a Time in a Western website which read in part:

Another wooden performance by Hayden and poorly filmed action scenes don’t add up to a classic 1950s Western.

And why would Quentin continue to follow through with a raid of a town with no significant loot to offer when he knows it’s been tipped off to his plans and he’s likely to lose lots of his men in doing so?

Sterling Hayden had no interest in acting. He became a star for the money to pay for stuff he actually wanted to do. I'm not entirely opposed to wooden performances, but he didn't look much like a celebrity gunslinger in this. He could have worn a black shirt or an interesting hat. 

Criminals arrive on horseback and they remain on horseback, the horses just standing there, the townsfolk shooting the criminals and the criminals shooting the townsfolk. No strategy involved.

The non-combatants take refuge in the church which would have made sense if it was bullet proof, made of stone. They could have at least stayed away from the windows.

Even a low budget movie costs a fortune. They could have done anything, and they chose to do this. I knowingly sought it out so I'm not complaining exactly. I sort of liked the first part, people just walking around talking. It wasn't very good, but it was like a TV show. You didn't have to pay close attention.

Wasn't life expectancy pretty short in the Old West? They probably could have saved money by giving it an all-teenage cast and they'd have some historical justification for it.

Directed by Ray Novarro.

Free on Western Classic Movies.

Angie Dickenson vs Betty White

Betty White had a sit-com in the '80's playing an Angie Dickenson-like TV star with show called Undercover Woman. I read at the time that Betty White and Angie Dickenson knew each other and that Dickenson was annoyed at the show. 

I don't think I ever watched a full episode of Police Woman, but it was a right-wing show. One episode I watched part of had Police Woman protecting a radical Black activist who was portrayed rather negatively, and now I read that there was an anti-Lesbian episode. Apparently, Police Woman knew a Lesbian in college and this gave her life-long antipathy for them. 

So, I'll have to side with Betty White in whatever feud she might have had with Police Woman.

TV shows back then rarely lived up to their opening credits. 

Rain Man (1988)

Tom Cruise was completely convincing as a slick lying arrogant yuppie grubbing for money, abducting his autistic-savant brother and holding him hostage, demanding half his late father's three million dollar estate. His character arc, where he becomes a nice guy at the end, wasn't convincing at all. I don't know if we were supposed to feel some terrible injustice was done in the end, because that wasn't my feeling.

I couldn't understand why Tom Cruise thought he should get any part of his father's estate when he hadn't spoken to him since he was a teenager. Also didn't understand how he got rich and successful after cutting himself off from his father at that stage of life.

In Rain Man, Tom Cruise has inherited his father's custom 1948 Buick Roadmaster convertible which he and his brother take on a cross country road trip. It might make a double feature with Macon County Line, set in 1953. about a couple of degenerates traveling in their 1948 Chrysler Town and Country convertible. The car was only five years old but needed a new fuel pump which I would imagine was a more realistic portrayal of automotive reliability of the era.

Trump on stairs

Donald Trump at the beginning of his speech to U.S. military leaders at Quantico, Virginia:

"We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day – every day, the guy’s falling down stairs – and I said, that’s not our president. We can’t have it. I’m very careful, you know, when I walk down stairs, I walk…very…slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just, try not to fall, ‘cause it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen, and it became a part of their legacy, you know. Walk nice and easy. You don’t have to set any records. Be cool! Be cool when you walk down, but don’t…don’t bop down the stairs. The one thing with Obama…I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen…da-da-da-da-teh-deh-bop-bop…I’ve never seen…he would go down those stairs, bop-bop, he wouldn’t hold on, he’d go down those stairs, I said, it’s great! I wouldn’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually, bad things are gonna happen, and it only takes one. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell. We had nothing.”

Woody Allen's Shadows & Fog (1991)

I saw it about 34 years ago when it first came out on VHS. I was disappointed. It could be lowered expectations at work, but I enjoyed watching it a second time.

Set somewhere in central Europe, apparently in the 1920s or '30s. A Nazi allegory. Allen joins other Jews trying to find a murderer prowling the city.

I took it as an arthouse film--it's in black & white--but John Baxter, in his biography of Allen, mentioned its failure as a horror movie which I found strange.

The Criterion Channel is featuring the films of Jodie Foster and included this movie. She has a small role as a prostitute, the weakest part of the movie. The prostitutes cheerfully chattering away about their work wasn't good, but it was shorter than I remembered.

Mia Farrow as a sword swallower in a circus who flees after she catches boyfriend clown John Malkovitch making out with Madonna. Farrow wanders around through the night with Allen. 

I didn't remember Fred Gwynne being in it. John Malkovitch, Donald Pleasance, Lilly Tomlin, David Ogden Stiers, Kathy Bates, Madonna, John Cusack and Kurtwood Smith among others. 

With music by Kurt Weill, mostly Threepenny Opera.

Henry Aldrich Haunts a House (1943), Vigilante Force (1976)

Available on YouTube. 72 minutes. Part of the Henry Aldrich series of comedies starring Jimmy Lydon.

Jimmy Lydon walked with a limp in this movie from a birth defect that was corrected in infancy. He was 20-years-old, it was 1943 and this was presumably what kept him out of World War Two. 

Henry wears a suit and tie to high school, but his father was mad at him for not getting into a fist fight when a school bully pushes him around. I don't know if this was a common attitude at the time. Maybe it was meant to be a subtle pro-war message. Lydon was one of the few movie teenagers to be taller than his movie parents.

Henry Aldrich has taken an interest in chemistry and has been hanging around with a chemistry professor who's come up with a formula to give people three times normal human strength. Henry drinks more of it than you're supposed to, walks home in the rain but is disoriented and staggers into a haunted mansion which is a front for a criminal enterprise.

Not really funny. Henry believes that, in his drugged state, he murdered his principal which should have been pretty good.

Free on YouTube.

I made it a double feature and watched Vigilante Force (1976) with 53-year-old Jimmy Lydon in a supporting role. But his role was pretty minor, I didn't quite recognize him and the movie wasn't very good. It might have been worth watching if Jimmy had killed anyone. 

Jan-Michael Vincent gets his Vietnam vet brother Kris Kristofferson to form a vigilante force to fight the rowdy oil workers who are terrorizing the town. It turns out that vigilantism is bad as Kris Kristofferson becomes power hungry. He forces banker David Doyle to give him a large cash loan, then has him run over with a car. 

With Bernadette Peters and Victoria Principal.

Produced by Roger Corman's brother, Gene. Free on Tubi. 

Patricia Highsmith's Cry of the Owl (BBC Radio 4)

Produced for British radio in 2002. The British still make radio shows, dramas, comedies, mysteries and so forth. Maybe it's because you have to pay a tax to watch TV there. 

Based on Patricia Highsmith's 1962 novel. A divorcee with a history of psychiatric problems becomes obsessed with a local woman who lives outside town. He prowls outside her house at night spying on her. She spots him. This doesn't seem wise but she invites him in. Over time, he becomes less and less obsessed with her while she's increasingly obsessed with him. Her now-ex-fiance is stalking both of them and his imbittered ex-wife is out to get him. The peeping tom is the most normal one in the story.

Adapted by Shaun McKenna, starring John Sharian, Joanne McQuinn and Adrian Lester.

Four half-hour episodes. Free on Internet Archive and on YouTube.

You can compare and contrast it with the 2009 movie with the same name. I haven't seen it, but it's apparently available on Prime if nowhere else. There was also Claude Chabrol's 1987 Le Cri du hibou if you can find it.

"Stupid human!" --DeepSeek A.I.

Well, I posted that thing several days ago. I removed it. I had turned to A.I. for information on a school movie I had seen 45 years ago, a Civil War movie in which a hippie playing a Confederate soldier has a nude scene, rather odd for a school movie. 

DeepSeek gave me detailed information about it. Some of it didn't sound quite right. The titles for the film that it gave me didn't make sense and the guy it named as director only made documentaries. The rest of the information sounded plausible enough and I didn't question it.

Then, today, I read something about Jimmy Lydon (1923 to 2022). He had been a child actor starting in the 1930s, starred in the Henry Aldrich series in the 1940s, he worked a lot in television starting in 1949. He went on to help create the TV series 77 Sunset Strip and M*A*S*H*. According to IMDb, he had overcame a birth defect. 

Out of curiosity, I asked Co-Pilot what his birth defect was. It said it didn't know.

I asked DeepSeek and it described a severe disability that he obviously didn't have. It went into some detail explaining how they concealed it in movies. 

I asked Co-Pilot again and it now said that he had had two club feet which had been corrected with surgery. I googled it and this was confirmed in an interview Lydon gave somewhere.

But what was DeepSeek thinking? I could go back and ask it, but I'm afraid to make it mad.

Just Pals (1920) John Ford

Silent, directed by John Ford. A child hobo (Georgie Stone) is pulled off a train and roughed up by a railroad employee. I don't think a child should be climbing around between boxcars on a moving train, so I have some sympathy for the railroad worker, but local ne'er-do-well Buck Jones rushes to the little fellow's defense and the railroad guy easily knocks him down as well.

A western comedy-drama about a very nice homeless man who befriends a homeless child. He does make the kid go to school. I thought female schoolteachers were barred from dating back then, but the teacher (Helen Ferguson) has a boyfriend who convinces her to embezzle school funds. When the kid is injured falling off a train, the doctor's wife thinks he's the missing child whose rich father offered a large reward for his return and Buck Jones and Georgie are separated

According to the intertitles, the kid says "hell" and "damn". Even in silent film, foul-mouthed children were cute. 

50 minutes. Free on Tubi and YouTube. $3.99 on AppleTV and PrimeVideo. 

Buck Jones died at 50 of injuries sustained in the horrible Coconut Grove fire in 1942. Georgie Stone's last film was made in 1923 when he was thirteen or fourteen. He died in 2010 when he was 100-years-old. Helen Ferguson gave up acting in 1933 and became a successful publicist. She retired in 1967 and died in 1977.

The Devil on Wheels (1947)

Early hot rod movie. Teens drive like idiots and one kid's father isn't much better, driving too fast in his big giant Buick, passing on the right. At one point, the kids break into the morgue to see if an unidentified hot rod fatality was a friend of theirs. They're almost caught by a night watchman who calls the police as they speed away. As they're fleeing police, Darryl Hickman causes an accident that kills his best friend and nearly kills his mother.

In the epilogue, the mother drives slowly and carefully while the father tells her to speed up and pass the other cars. They were driving to reform school to pick up their son who just finished his sentence for manslaughter.

The kids could have been a force for good in the world if they were shown installing makeshift seatbelts in their horrible cars.

From PRC, the most impoverished of the poverty row studios.

According to IMDb, it was the first movie to show its female leads in bikini tops and there's early use of the word "groovy".

67 minutes. Free on Tubi.

Roman Polanski's "Murder" (Poland, 1957)

Roman Polanski's first student film. Eighty-seven seconds long, and the opening credits take up nearly 14 seconds. The "Koniec" at the end was another eight seconds. 

Not much of a narrative arc, but I liked the close-up of the Polish door handle. In its brevity, Polanski avoided the pitfalls of seemingly more ambitious student films. 

Here it is, posted 17 years ago on YouTube.

 

Blake Edwards' Wild Rovers (1971) William Holden, Ryan O'Neal

 

A two-hour sixteen-minute western. I don't know if that includes the Overture and "Entr'acte". Written and directed by Blake Edwards which seemed surprising.

Made in 1971. A somewhat aged William Holden and a relatively young Ryan O'Neal are cowboys. After one of their fellow cowboys is killed in a freak accident, they discuss how bad it is being cowboys and mortality in general and William Holden makes an idle comment about bank robbery as a way out. 

They work for rancher Karl Malden whose sons (Joe Don Baker and Tom Skerritt) pursue them into Mexico where they go to start a new life with their stolen money.

Bank robberies are pretty standard for westerns. The one in this movie was a little unusual, involved hostages. The barroom brawl was on a small scale with only five or six guys fighting for no reason. They talk a lot and are slow to get to the point. Every conversation drags on longer than necessary. They go on and on about Ryan O'Neal bringing a puppy with him. 

Later, they need another horse, so they lasso an innocent wild horse and quickly break him in. Maybe you can really do that, but I wouldn't take the movie's word for it.

With Little House in the Prairie's Victor French, Joe Don Baker, Tom Skerritt, Moses Gunn, Ted Gehring, Bruno VeSota. With Blake Edwards' son, Geoffery (Julie Andrews' stepson).

I never noticed Ryan O'Neal was left-handed.

Reportedly, Edwards intended this as a three-hour epic. The studio cut it down by 40 minutes and altered the ending causing him to disown it. 

Free on Tubi.

Trump posts cruel J.D. Vance meme

 A while back, I copied and pasted something that turned out to be eerily prescient. I know I used the phrase "eerily prescient" in the last post. From counterpunch.com some months ago:

+ Before JD Vance’s conversion to MAGA, this is what he had to say about Trump…

          “Might be America’s Hitler”

“I’m a never Trump guy”  

 

“Never liked him” 

 

“Terrible candidate” 

  

“Idiot if you voted for him” 

 

“Might be a cynical asshole” 

 

“Cultural heroin"  

 

“Noxious and reprehensible”

+ Of course, none of these aspersions bother Trump. Vance has surrendered, bent the knee and kissed Trump’s feet. And Trump will parade him around like a captured warlord, until he tires of him and begins subjecting him to ridicule and humiliation. [emphasis added]

And it has begun. I think Vance said something about Jeffrey Epstein that turned out to be unhelpful to Trump, so Trump posted an unkind meme of an overweight J.D. Vance.

Hillary Clinton was right about one thing

Hillary Clinton was a serious threat to humanity herself, but she turned out to be eerily prescient about Trump:

“A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

--San Diego, June 2016.

And, from another speech: 

“It’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.”

And now, from Trump, posted on "Truth Social", reacting to Dmitry Medvedev's tweet reminding Trump of Russia's "Dead Hand" system that would launch nuclear retaliation in the event of a U.S. first strike on Moscow:

“I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.”

Fire Maidens from Outer Space (UK, 1956)

You know those movies where men find themselves shipwrecked on an island inhabited by sex starved young women who need men to mate? Pretty much what you had here except that it was on a moon of Jupiter. 

"You know. There could be humans on that planet," says a British scientist before the launch.

I don't know how the British felt about the stock footage of a V2 rocket as a US/British spaceship to Jupiter. The movie was made only eleven years after the Nazis were launching those things at London.

The Fire Maidens are all the offspring of one old guy. He's the only man there and couldn't very well breed with his own daughters, so it will be up to the Earthmen. 

Cat Women of the Moon was a better film with its references to genocide and the men and women hating each other. That movie had a giant moon spider. All this film has is a big dark complected caveman-like fellow they call "The Creature" who the Fire Maidens want the men to murder. The Fire Maidens were colonists from Atlantis. I guess he was an indigenous life form they wanted to exterminate. So there was genocide in this movie, too.

I'm making it sound more interesting than it is.

Made in the UK by an American director. 

81 minutes. Free on Pub-D-Hub.

Nero's Mistress (Italy, 1956)

Vittorio De Sica, Brigitte Bardot, Gloria Swanson. Alberto Sordi as Nero. 

Italian comedy. Nero is vacationing on the coast when his mother comes to visit. Gloria Swanson dubbed in Italian but acting much as she did in Sunset Boulevard was pretty good as the emporer's mother, Agrippina. Nothing was terribly funny, but it was amusing in its way. Nero keeps trying to murder his mother. When someone advises him to have a deaf-mute kill her because they can't talk if they're caught, he orders that a slave be taken away and rendered deaf and mute in a horrible way. You can't portray ancient Romans as normal people, but how should you react to that?

Directed by Steno. Cinematography by Mario Bava.

In color, available on Tubi and Amazon Prime. 

"The Face" (Poland, 1966)

Poor film students spend all their time studying feature films, but they're forced to make short films as their student projects. Short films aren't the same thing.

In this movie, future director Krzysztof Kieslowski plays a tortured artist. He expresses the depth of his distress by desperately lighting a cigarette. Both these things---the tortured artist and smoking as a sign of emotional distress---are widely ridiculed tropes in American student films, but if Polish film students do the same thing, there must be something to it.

Tortured artist examines his face in the mirror and goes nuts attacking his supply of self-portraits. Directed by Kieslowski's classmate, Piotr Studzinski. Kieslowski went on to direct such movies as A Short Film About Killing. 

Six minutes. Available on The Criterion Channel.

People really like Jaws

I've been looking around online and I keep seeing people who think Jaws is the greatest movie ever made. Maybe they haven't seen very many movies. On the other hand, I haven't watched it in years. My people, if we liked a movie, would see it over and over, so I had seen it several times when it came out and saw it on TV a couple of times. But I don't want to see the bloody death of a child again or the adults either, and you have to pay to see it on streaming video. Maybe I'd think it was the greatest movie ever if I saw it again but I doubt it.

Roger Corman recognized it as an exploitation film and was alarmed that a major studio figured out that they could do what he had been doing for years.

But, offhand, thinking only of American movies from the '70's that were better than Jaws---there was Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Chinatown. 

Spielberg himself had to be bothered that, in lists of the greatest films, other New Hollywood directors had far more grown-up movies while all he had was his big-budget gore film. Or maybe he thought he was brilliant, making a shark movie while those snotty auteurs made pretentious snooze-fests. If so, good for him. Let him have his high self-esteem, and his billions of dollars.

I know I've seen The Godfather and Apocalypse Now but I barely remember either one. Maybe I shouldn't have listed them above. I have no memory at all of Das Boot but I know I watched it. I had a friend who was taking German and was excited about it. The German teacher had been enthusing over it but hadn't said anything about The Tin Drum a year or two year earlier. So Jaws was at least memorable. 

Remember the scene in Ed Wood where 
Bela Lugosi rolls around pretending to be
killed by an obviously fake
rubber octopus?

Young, Violent, Dangerous (Italy, 1976)

I had seen this years ago on something called "The Movie Greats Network", a syndicated thing showing really awful movies they paid almost nothing for.

At the time, I thought Young, Violent, Dangerous was terrible. I kept watching, distracted by the dubbing. They did a pretty good job. It sounded dubbed, but they had the lip sync down. 

The movie starts with a girl reporting her boyfriend to the police. He and his friends were planning a robbery armed with toy guns. She didn't want him going to prison for anything that stupid. Police stake out the gas station they're going to rob. They apparently tell the owner they were going to have toy guns so he refuses to hand over the money. The guns turn out to be real. The owner is shot and the three of them shoot their way out when police move in. The race away in their stolen Fiat.

They pick up submachine guns from their gun source and rob a grocery store.

One guy keeps laughing and acting crazy and obnoxious. I kept wishing they'd shoot him. Made me think of the 1949 juvenile delinquency movie City Across the River. One member of the gang in that movie is nicknamed "Crazy". In his first scene he was flapping his arms saying, "Look, fellas! Look! I'm a boid! I'm a boid!" In Young, Violent, Dangerous, the boys stop and look at a TV playing in the window of an appliance store and he starts imitating a surfer on TV. Later, he throws handfuls of money out the window of the car. 

It wasn't as bad as I remembered. It was unmarred by the "three act structure", was made up of a series of sequences. The gas station robbery, followed by a sex scene at a gun dealers house, followed by a grocery store robbery, followed by some other sequences.

In one scene, the Italian detective berated the boys' petit-bourgeois parents. Their sons were in college but he thought they were negligent for not knowing where they were at all times. Maybe Italian children mature slower.

Free on Tubi.

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.

The Pit (Canada, 1981)

Canadian kid actor Sammy Snyders stars as a weird, friendless, perverted tween who starts killing his enemies by luring them into the woods and shoving them into a pit he discovered. When his parents go out of town, they hire a psychology major working her way through college babysitting, specializing in problem children. He gets advice from his teddy bear. People are terribly unkind to him. The elderly, younger children, classmates, teachers. 

I wasn't sure what to make of it. The kid either has a very serious mental illness or he was in touch with supernatural forces and an unknown species if man-eating hominid living in the pit. The filmmakers weren't sure themselves or they were trying to have it both ways. We can hear the Teddy Bear speaking to the kid. It seems to have his voice and it knows what he knows and no more, but we see the bear's head turn when no one is there.

It was rather grim until they started playing "funny" music as he murdered people by knocking them into the pit.

Produced by Canadians, filmed in Wisconsin. Reportedly has developed a cult following.

Free on Tubi.

Mark Cousins' The Story of Film: A New Generation

A follow up to The Story of Film: An Odyssey, looking at movies from 2010 to 2021. Starts with clips from superhero movies and one of those computer animation movies, stuff I haven't seen and have no curiosity about. Watching this didn't make me want to see them. I watch so many terrible movies, you'd think I'd be more open-minded. If Mark Cousins can appreciate them, shouldn't I make an effort?

But feeling guilty for not forcing yourself to watch more TV seems crazy. 

Discusses foreign films from India, France, Philippines, Nepal and elsewhere, documentaries, slow cinema, mostly movies I'd never heard of.  

Free on Tubi, Plex and Xumo, Prime Video for $1.99; free on Fandango, Apple TV, Hoopla and something called Free Movies+.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey is free on Tubi, Roku Channel, Criterion, Plex, Xumo, Prime Video, Filmzie, and Freevee. 

Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

I've heard of people reporting monstrous crimes who, afraid the police wouldn't believe them, lied to make sure they'd investigate or punched up the story a bit so the press would take interest. This happened in one horrible police torture case in New York and a case of farmers murdering farm workers. The lesson of Attack of the Puppet People is not to tell police crazy stories you know full well they'd never believe even if they're true. A young woman goes to police to report that her boyfriend had been turned into a doll.

A lonely doll maker takes to shrinking people. Uses them as puppets in a little puppet theater he plays with at night. The puppet people never really "attack". 

I'll give away the ending. A couple of his victims escape and use his device to return to their normal size then they shove him out of the way and set off to report him to the police. Like that would do any good. 

Stars John Agar, John Hoyt and June Kenney.

With Hank Patterson (Fred Ziffel on Green Acres) and Bill Hickman (the stunt driver in the Dodge Charger in Bullitt).

Directed by Bert I. Gordon.

Storm Warning (1951)

Something from Counterpunch.com.:

As a parable from the past to help us come to grips with our perilous present, you could do worse than screen Storm Warning, the 1951 noir that may be the most unlikely Klan movie ever made. It features Doris Day as the pregnant young wife who works in a bowling alley that just happens to serve as the local Klavern, but is clueless about everything going on around her; Ginger Rogers as her fashion model sibling who drops in for an unnaounced visit to check on little sister and exposes DD’s husband as a member of the KKK; and Ronald Reagan as the smalltown prosecutor who ends up pursuing the Klan for lynching a…reporter! Reagan and Rogers were two of Hollywood’s most prominent right-wingers. In fact, the film was shot during the time when Reagan (FBI Confidential Informant T-10), as president of SAG, was secretly snitching out members of the actors’ union he led to the Feds as suspected Reds. The theme of the Storm Warning isn’t that the KKK is racist or hates Jews (those details are taken as a given), but that it is…corrupt. A great film if you’re in the right state of mind. I watched it under the influence of a bottle of Côte du Rhone and Oregon’s most profitable agricultural product…You can find it on TCM and Criterion.

I checked the Criterion channel and didn't see it on there. Maybe it was just me. I never heard of the movie. I didn't know that Ginger Rogers was a right-winger but I don't know much of anything about her.

It's available on other streaming channels such as Max with a subscription or on Apple TV, Prime or Fandango for three bucks.

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

When I first saw this movie at eleven or twelve, I didn't understand how Marlon Brando kept getting beaten up. Karl Malden plays a priest who knocks him down with one punch, then he was barely a match for Lee J Cobb. There's no way he could have been a contender.

Elia Kazan's excuse for testifying before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. I don't know what it tells you that he picked Marlon Brando to represent him in the movie. Any analogy between the Communist Party and organized crime was absurd

Available on the Criterion Channel, free on Tubi, or you can pay $4 and see it on AppleTV, Fandango or Prime.

Kurosawa's Roshomon (Japan, 1950)

It wasn't so much a story from different points of view as it was people lying to make themselves look good, although one of the guys hearing the stories keeps commenting that people even lie to themselves. The people in this thing couldn't have been THAT self-deceiving.

Three people get out of the rain at the ruined Roshomon gate and talk about a recent murder case, A samurai and his wife were traveling, the husband on foot, the wife on sitting side saddle on a horse. A bandit (Toshiro Mifune) offers to sell the husband items he looted from a grave but jumps him, ties him up and rapes his wife. Then, depending on the version, the bandit fights to the death with the husband, the husband commits suicide or a third thing.

If you ask me, the wife was the real hero. 

I once read the short story by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) sitting in the university library. It was fairly short if I remember correctly, just the testimony of the witnesses in the case including the victim who testified through a medium. It's surprising it could be stretched out into a 90 minute movie although they re-enacted the same events about four times.

If the film is to be believed, fake laughing was common in Japan back then.

It might make a good double feature with John Huston's Freud (1962). There was at least one sequence where we see two versions of the same event. 

The Loveless (1981) Willem Dafoe, directed by Katheryn Bigelow & Monty Montgomery

I liked the odd 1950's biker slang. "He's allergic to electricity," one says, referring to one who apparently committed a murder they show in a confused flashback at the end. He's distressed at the thought of the electric chair. His friends weren't very sensitive.

Like a cross between The Wild One and some of the films of Kenneth Anger but with implied incest. It didn't have much plot. Bikers arrive at a roadside restaurant. They meet up there so they continue to Daytona to see the races, but they're delayed when one of them needs a repair on his motorcycle. Willem Dafoe briefly befriends a girl in Corvette. They get a motel room, but they shouldn't have parked the Corvette in front because her wealthy, heavily armed father sees it and stops to investigate.

I see bikers now riding around on their stupid-looking choppers. There's one guy in town who has to ride with both arms raised straight over his head to reach the handlebars. Is that comfortable or enjoyable? The big giant motorcycles they ride in this movie looked much more comfortable, like driving an extremely dangerous convertible. The bikers dress in black leather but don't wear helmets. 

Dafoe's first starring role. Katheryn Bigelow and Monty Mongomery's directorial debuts.

Available on The Criterion Channel and is free on Tubi, Freevee, Pluto, Xumo, Plex and Roku Channel.

Maniac (1980) Joe Spinell, directed by William Lustig

I clicked on an "article", little more than a list of movies that Gene Siskel walked out on. I knew about a couple of them. There was Disney's The Million Dollar Duck, an inoffensive movie I liked when I was nine. There was nothing upsetting in it, nothing that might cause a mentally unbalanced person to do anything awful. It wasn't war propaganda or sexually perverse. Nothing abnormal or a danger to society. It may have been a little sexist. It probably had an all-white cast but wasn't explicitly racist otherwise. Couldn't Siskel just relax and watch a movie about a duck that laid eggs with yolks made of gold? Is that any worse than the other crap they have in movies? I thought the fact that only the yolks were made of gold gave it scientific credibility.

Well. I looked on streaming video. Found a morally objectionable movie Siskel walked out on, Maniac, about a gross guy who goes around murdering people. It was bloodier and gorier than other such movies. Nothing really going for it. The star was a hemophiliac in real life so the bloodiness of the movie may have had some personal meaning to him. No offense to hemophiliacs. The poor guy died of a heart attack in his 50's. 

I can't recommend it. I didn't watch slasher movies back when they were popular, but seeing them now, years later, most of them seem okay. They're about random murders, so the non-murder scenes are sort of laid back. They weren't straining to create an intricate plot. The death tolls were fairly low compared to things made since then. 

They stole a scene from If.... In that movie, Malcolm McDowell sat in his dorm with a CO2 pistol shooting darts into the pictures he had taped up on the walls. Joe Spinell did the same thing in this movie, but he had fewer darts. He should have put on safety goggles.

I can't fault Siskel for walking out.

The star said that if you don't like horror movies, don't see it, which seems sensible but not really a defense of its content.