Withnail & I (UK 1987)

In Withnail & I, two young out-of-work actors (Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann) are freezing in their apartment. They go out to the country for a few days and freeze in a cottage owned by Withnail's uncle. They go there in a battered Jaguar Mk 2. Even if you don't care what your car looks like, make sure it has fully functioning windshield wipers and headlights.

Set in 1969. Based on an unpublished novel by writer-director Bruce Robinson based loosely on his life in London at that time. Withnail's uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) coming on to Paul McGann was based on Robinson's experience acting in the movie Romeo & Juliet when Zeffirelli took an inordinate interest in him. 

Usually, I look at movies like this and think the characters' lives wouldn't be so bad if they would just cheer up, but their lives looked awful, freezing in an apartment, McGann being friends with an alcoholic and living with him as a roommate.  

To paraphrase the late Alexander Cockburn, friendship is often a question of how much you're willing to put up with and for how long.

Not quite the same genre as Midnight Cowboy or Of Mice and Men where you have two impoverished people who have no one but each other, but neither one is of any help. These two have theatrical agents and one has a wealthy uncle he turns to.

I guess I should mention that it's a comedy. 

Available on The Criterion and on Max.

Jay North, RIP

Jay North has died of colon cancer at age 73. He played Dennis the Menace on TV from 1959 to 1963. He was abused by his horrible aunt who for some reason acted as his guardian on the set. Some years ago, he gave some very angry interviews about his time as a child actor. Made me feel guilty for having ever watched it.

There was an episode of Dennis the Menace I remember seeing, but now I wonder if I really did. My memory was that Dennis had befriended a kid who had recently moved to the United States, perhaps from Latin America. You know how Dennis would say "Jeepers" all the time? The kid asks him in his foreign accent, What is this 'jeepers'? Dennis says, well, it means Jiminy Crickets, or Gee Whiz, and I think he named a couple of other such expressions. And it dawned on me that each one he named was a euphemism for "Jesus" or "Jesus Christ". It seems like the writers must have known this. I had never thought about it before, but they exposed Dennis's constant barely disguised blasphemy. 

I had seen him on Dennis the Menace, watched Maya on Canadian TV in the middle of the night, saw Zebra in the Kitchen on TV one afternoon and his R-rated exploitation film, The Teacher. I even saw him on The Dating Game in the episode's original broadcast premiere. 

And there was the time, on the Fourth of July---my grandmother was living with us and couldn't go to see fireworks so we set off fireworks in the driveway. I bought some discarded educational films on eBay and showed a patriotic film aimed at kindergarteners or first graders. There were shots of American flags in various public places while Jay North and maybe Margaret O'Brien recited the Pledge of Allegiance several times. I used an extension cord and projected the film on the side of the house to set start things off. 

Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style (1961)

Long ago, I watched the Italian movie Alfredo, Alfredo (1972) starring Italian-dubbed Dustin Hoffman in the title role. He impulsively marries his girlfriend but should have put more thought into it because it was the late '60s and divorce was illegal in Italy. They could legally separate, but he could go to prison if he got caught with another woman.

Divorce Italian Style was made eleven years earlier by the same director. Marcello Mastroianni as a down and out Sicilian nobleman who wants to marry his teenage cousin, which is weird enough in itself. He's already married. There's no divorce in Italy but, at least in Sicily, if a husband finds his wife with another man, he can murder her and receive a light sentence for committing an honor killing. All he has to do is manipulate his wife (Daniela Rocca) into sleeping with another man and he's home free. But would you want to be that guy's second wife?

I didn't find it hilarious. We see him fantasizing about his wife being boiled to death, fired off in a rocket, drowning in quicksand or being gunned down by the Mafia. Sicily looked beautiful but I wouldn't want to live there.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

There are used copies of Alfredo, Alfredo available on dvd.

A Knife for the Ladies (1974)

This is going to be short. A not-very-good western crossed with a not-very-good slasher movie. In fairness, it was made before slasher movies really took off in the '80s so it didn't have anything to model itself on. A private detective arrives in a small western town to investigate a series of knife murders of prostitutes. A 10-year-old played by the director's son is a witness but extrapolates on what he saw and gets an innocent man lynched. 

I assumed the wealthy town matriarch was using cocaine or heroin, both perfectly legal at the time, but, whatever her problem was, she was buying large amounts of a drug that was also used to treat syphilis. I won't give it away here, but there were some questions about her late son.

It wasn't very good. They should have let Jack Elam clean himself up. He was playing the sheriff. Let him have some dignity. Did he have to be an alcoholic?

There wasn't that much blood and no gore, really, which is okay with me. It was rated R in its day.

Picks up a bit at the very end.

Free on Tubi.

I don't know what's wrong with me. There was a time when I only watched arthouse movies. 

Walter Hill's Dead for a Dollar (2022)

I started watching the movie thinking about how idiotic westerns were and wondering how they were ever popular. But it got better as I started to relax and accept it. I turned it on because I had been watching old episodes of The New Adventures of Old Christine and Hamish Linklater was in both. In Dead for a Dollar, he plays a very bad man who hires a bounty hunter to find his (white) wife who had run away with a Black Army deserter. 

There's a dedication to Budd Boetticher in the closing credits. He made a series of westerns in the 1950s and this movie had some elements of the formula his movies followed. You had a woman who had some monetary value, there being a reward out for her and her being the subject of a ransom demand. 

Hamish Linklater was great.

Free on Tubi.

Numero zero (France, 1971)

 

A documentary. The director, Jean Eustache, talks with his grandmother, Odette Robert. She sits at a table wearing sunglasses and talks fast about her life. She must have been born in 1900 and was only 71 when this movie was made. She led a difficult life. Her mother died when she was seven, she had an abusive stepmother, she married a guy who turned out to be a swinger. She mentions men in her family who fought in World War One and later, World War Two. One was put in a concentration camp. There were tragedies in her family, deaths of children and old people. It sounded like she was related to some terrible people but a lot of that was due to unwise marriages.

I tried to picture my old hillbilly relatives doing this. The ones I knew are almost gone now, but as far as I know they led happier lives or at least got along with each other. I'm closer to the grandmother's age than the director's. If it were me, I wouldn't have had nearly as much to tell.

An hour and fifty-two minutes. Available on the Criterion Channel. 

Carl Erik Rinsch arrested

Director Carl Erik Rinsch was arrested for defrauding Netflix of millions of dollars that was supposed to go to a science fiction series he was making. They spent millions, then he asked for another $11 million to finish the series but instead invested the money, lost half of it, then invested what was left in cryptocurrency and did pretty well. But he then bought several Rolls Royces and a Ferrari and a large amount of high priced furniture.

I never heard of him. He directed TV commercials and the movie 47 Ronin which had a $144 million budget. I looked him up on Wikipedia and it sounds like the poor guy was out of his mind or at least had an amphetamine addiction. Good luck to him.

The story should be inspiring to film students and those who wish they were. An inexperienced director got $144 million to direct a movie. It wasn't very good, but Netflix still gave him millions more to make a TV series. I'm also amazed how much he made investing in crypto "currency".