The TRUTH about Mr Holland's Opus

It stunk.

First of all, the opus---the music he spent his entire adult life composing---was terrible. Just awful!

Hard to believe that the makers of the movie didn't notice this.

But that was the real point of the movie.

Look at what happens at the end. Mr Holland realizes he was a great music teacher. All his students come back. They play his terrible, terrible music. Then they all talk to him. One of them is governor of the state. Some of them tell him what they do now.

"I'm an accountant!"

"I'm a comptroller!"

And that's how we know he was a great music teacher---because not one of his students went on to become a musician.

We see that Mr Holland's life as a musician was a complete waste. He spent his whole life writing a single tune and it was terrible. But he cheers up when he realizes his one true achievement in life was steering young people away from music--away from being an idiot like him.

I've never been able to sit through that movie. Didn't he have some problem because his son was deaf and he was too devoted to music to relate to the hearing impaired? This below-average no-talent bum.

People were gushing over that movie. They were pointing to it to advocate funding for school music programs.

And they're right. The whole point of school music is to steer the young away from music. They play classical music and jazz. The two least popular and most difficult genres. If the Beatles had gone to a school with a strong music program, they'd have died working in the coal mines. Or the shipyards. Whatever they have in Liverpool.

Music teachers think they're professional musicians. P.E. teachers think they're professional athletes. Art teachers think they're artists. Drama teachers think they're actors. The ones who teach academic subjects aren't quite as bad, but I've had English teachers who thought they were poets.

A guy I knew and his horrible experience in a school music program

I worked with a guy. He went to one of the local middle schools. I think it was Jefferson Middle School. Named for violent racist slave owner Thomas Jefferson, the school declared itself a "racism free zone". A racism free zone where a Russian kid was brutally beaten in the hallway a few feet from the principal's office by some right-wing communist-hating Hispanic thugs---I don't know their precise origins, if they were the spawn of anti-Castro Cubans or Honduran death squad members or pro-Pinochet Chileans.

The Russian kid was hospitalized and spent a week in bed at home. He had broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. When the principal of the school heard about it, she took quick, decisive action. She suggested the Russian parents meet with the Russian-hating thug parents.

The school had a music program. All 7th graders got to "choose" an "elective". They could either take band, orchestra or choir. And they had to pay for the privilege. They had to pay a fee to the school. Kids who either didn't have the money to pay the fee or didn't feel like paying for a class they didn't want to begin with were punished by being put in class called "Study Skills".

This went on all year. Each term, you either signed up for one of the music classes and handed over money, or you had to take "Study Skills" and go through the exact same class again and again and again.

So this fellow I knew signed up for band.

First, he had to listen to the teacher gloat that the school band had played for the President of the United States. Apparently the band played while George Bush, Sr., was campaigning somewhere in the state. I doubt he was listening too closely.

So the guy I knew started on one instrument. They moved him to a different one. It didn't help. He was tone deaf.

So they put him on drums. They found out was also arhythmic.

The teacher then tried to bully him into leaving the class. Either take choir or Study Skills.

But he held his ground. He paid his money. He had as much right to be in that class as anyone else and he refused to leave.

But there you have it. A public school devoted to music. Devoted to letting a college graduate with a soft government job delude himself into thinking he's a musician--a bandleader--and forcing students to bankroll his fantasy and punishing any who refuse.

Breaking Bad again

I don't know. Maybe I was wrong about Breaking Bad.

I mean, maybe Walt's transformation into a bad, bad man was a bit more abrupt than I thought. Truth is, I haven't been watching the show regularly enough.

But he did show surprising physical courage early on which must have come in large part from being terminally ill. They should have shown him as teacher disciplining unruly teenagers to foreshadow his standing up to the drug dealers.

Having him drive a hideous Pontiac Aztek seems like a stroke of genius.

What were the other great automotive casting decisions?

Rockford Files---Jim Rockford's Firebird

Hawaii Five-O---those big black Ford LTDs.

The Avengers---Emma Peel's Lotus Elan.

Married With Children---Al Bundy's Dodge.

I wouldn't count any that were obvious or unsubtle. Like the truck on The Beverly Hillbillies, or that thing Tom Selleck drove around in on Magnum P.I. or the antique Thunderbird the guy drove on Vegas.

There was the Sunbeam, the Kharman Ghia and the Opel GT Maxwell Smart drove, but they only appeared in the opening.

And the worst automotive choice in a TV series:

The big American station wagon with wood on the sides that Charlie's Angels drove around in. And the Mustang II one of them had.

The time I watched an Israeli movie

Israel is such a nasty, vile little country.

I watched an Israeli children's movie once. It was on TV. And this was on a pro-Israeli show. They'd show all this stuff gushing over how wonderful Israel is.

What the hell was it called? Hello, Jerusalem? Shalome something?

They showed a short film. A boy and a girl steal some money and run away to avoid going to the dentist. They buy candy. They walk out somewhere. They make a fire. A couple of Palestinian children come over to join them.

As an American, I had certain expectation. I figured they would initially distrust each other, but would soon become friends.

No. That's not what happened.

The two Jewish children sit there. The girl whispers to the boy, "They're so creepy!" Then she says, "Make them go away!"

Then we see some thuggish plainsclothes Israeli cops threatening an old Palestinian demanding to know where the two children are.

I had videotaped it. I told a friend about it---a Zionist. He didn't believe me. Then I showed it to him.

"You weren't kidding," he said.

Didn't change his views about Israel. I guess if the actual slaughter of Palestinian children year after year didn't change his mind, watching a movie advocating hatred of them wouldn't do it.

Ray Milland, Bryan Cranston

Ray Milland

There was a movie years ago called Panic in the Year Zero, 1962. American International Pictures. A tale of survival and sex slavery. Directed by and starring Ray Milland.

A family goes on a camping trip. Ray Milland, his wife, Jean Hagen, and his children, Mary Mitchell and Frankie Avelon.

Good thing they brought guns.

They're heading out and there are some odd reports on the radio, I don't remember. But they stop and get out of the car, look back and see a large mushroom cloud where Los Angeles was supposed to be.

Ray Milland instantly turns survivalist.

Cars are streaming out of LA. The traffic is rather heavy. They can't pull onto the road---there are too many cars! They won't stop and let them in!

So Ray Milland and Frankie grab a can of gasoline. They toss it into the road and set a large fire giving them time to merge.

The family hides out in a cave. Mary is taken prisoner and held as a sex slave by some young fellows, if I recall correctly. Ray Milland and Frankie Avalon kill them.

Milland turns instantly into an animal! He's willing to do whatever he has to survive. He doesn't care who suffers! He'll cause a massive pile-up on the road if it will allow him and his family to safely merge! He robs a small general store when the owner hears about the nuclear war and starts price gouging.

As one critic pointed out, Ray Milland was little better than the thugs who killed people and kept his daughter as a sex slave.

Bryan Cranston

On Malcolm in the Middle he was a very nice man consumed with love for his horrible wife and children.

On Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston starts out as a mild mannered high school science teacher. His DEA agent brother-in-law thinks he's a wimp.

But when he finds out he's terminally ill, Cranston decides to start producing methamphetamine so he'll be able to leave money for his family.

And he gradually gets worse. More and more violent and depraved as he gets deeper and deeper into his work.

I guess the point here is to contrast the instantaneous change Ray Milland went through. A nuclear attack and, POW!, he's a cruel heartless survivalist.

Bryan Cranston goes into the meth business thinking he can remain a nice guy. But there's no way to avoid certain things. There's a guy. They hold him prisoner. They don't want to kill him, but what else can they do?

He also seems to become distant from his wife and son. He works with one of his former students who he learned was a drug dealer. He's closer to him than to his own teenage son who begins to seem rather childish in comparison.

I don't know which is more realistic.

My guess is that someone changing from good to evil would probably be more like---

Like teenagers. They don't gradually drift from being immature children to being mature adults. It's like the changing of the guards. The new guards arrives. The old guard goes away. But for a moment or two, both guards are there at the same time.

Teenagers make the transition like that. They act like children half the time. They act like adults the other half. If they're lucky, the adult half gradually takes over.

The new Karate Kid

The old Karate Kid...they were teenagers and beat each other up a lot worse, and they made it look so easy. Wax the car, work on the deck, and you could win a karate tournament.

Maybe it was because Pat Morita, TV's Arnold, didn't know karate. He said he saw a karate school assumed it was a latin dance studio. (Interestingly enough, the U.S. banned martial arts in Occupied Japan at the end of World War Two, but did not ban karate because they thought it was a Japanese dance.)

The new karate kid----what are they calling it? The Kung Fu Kid?----has Jackie Chan who learned martial arts through years of horrible, monstrous abuse in a Chinese Circus. His parents left him there while they worked overseas. He might not care for the idea of the wax on-wax off thing. He suffered for years, spent a childhood in hell, and that's all you have to do?

It's just too easy

The problem facing low budget movie makers

There was an article posted somewhere. It discussed some poor wretch. Photography was his life. He became a professional photographer. But he was having a terrible time getting work. Newspapers and magazine are shrinking or disappearing completely. On top of that, everybody has a digital camera now. The article went on to tell about a housewife who posted photos on Flickr and now they're being purchased as stock photos.

Seems like independent filmmakers are in a similar boat. The world's full of video cameras. Anybody who wants to make a movie can make a movie. Even someone who just has a mild, passing interest in making a movie can make a movie. In fact, their movies would probably be better because they wouldn't try as hard.

What we need to do is this:

Sit down and watch hours and hours of You Tube videos. Then figure out how to distinguish your video from theirs.

There was a time when shakey hand-held cameras created the illusion of reality. Now it just makes it looks like something someone put on YouTube.

John Waters' Role Models

John Waters has written a new book. Role Models. About the various persons he looks to as role models, including Johnny Mathis and some makers of pornographic movies. Gave an interesting interview to Terry Gross on Fresh Air. You can listen to it at www.freshair.com.

Come to think of it, I said something rude about John Waters in a recent post. About his anti-Diane Linkletter movie.

As I understand it, Waters made "The Diane Linkletter Story" to test out the single-system sound camera he was using to make Pink Flamingos.

Was it really necessary to record live sound?

And, if you ask me, low budget movie makers who shoot without sound and dub everything put way too much work into it.

Look at Manos: The Hands of Fate. It was shot without sound and dubbed. Would that movie really have been any worse if the lip-sych had been a bit off? The voice side of the acting might have been more interesting if they hadn't had to focus on matching everything exactly.

Would it really have hurt if Pink Flamingoes had been sloppily dubbed? Not all that sloppy, but somewhat sloppy. Even John Waters was kind of embarrassed by the overall quality. He could have filmed it faster and cheaper. Wouldn't need to shoot re-takes for bad sound or flubbed lines (although he probably didn't anyway.)

Maybe do it like Doris Wishman where they just avoided showing the actors' mouths while they talked. Gave it kind of an artistic quality----the camera showing people's feet or their hands gesturing, or the person who wasn't talking, listening thoughtfully.