Breaking Bad: These things actually happen

Breaking Bad is a made-for-cable TV series on AMC. It's about a mild mannered high school chemistry teacher. He is diagnosed with terminal cancer. To provide for his family after he's gone, he begins producing methamphetamine.

Well, these things do happen, as in the case below.

This is a case of them using meth themselves. If they wanted stimulants, they should have done what other teachers do---break into the nurse's office and swipe the kids' Ritalin.

From The Weekly Vice:

Charleston, West Virginia - A West Virginia public school has been shut down and two teachers have been arrested after authorities discovered trace amounts of meth distributed throughout the school building - even in the ducts, principal's office, hallways and bathrooms.

Jack Turley, a teacher, and Keith Phipps, a principal, were charged with contaminating the building with enough meth to shut it down until further notice.

According to West Virginia state police, Turley and Phipps were under investigation this spring when officers found traces of meth in the ducts, the principal's office, the hallways, and the bathrooms at the Boone County Career and Technical Center. The drug traces were discovered through testing by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.

Investigators say Turley admitted that he had smoked methamphetamine with Phipps in the principal's office. The school is closed until a decontamination process can be completed. Officers do not believe the drug was manufactured at the school. Both suspects were suspended from their positions pending the final outcome of the investigation.

Turley was booked into jail and charged with manufacturing methamphetamine and procuring Sudafed for producing methamphetamine.

Phipps was booked into charged with purchasing over the legal limit of Sudafed.

Mel Gibson, Judah Maccabee

After all his anti-Semitic stuff, Mel Gibson is reportedly developing some sort of biopic about someone called Judah Maccabee whose ancient victory is celebrated by Hannakah.

Gibson has his problems with accusations of anti-Semitism, but, as Palestinians prepare to declare statehood and as Israelis prepare to massacre them for it, he shouldn't be making crap like that.

I never liked Mel Gibson. I disliked him long before everyone else did.

To be fair to Gibson, all his expressions of racial and anti-gay hatred are little compared to all the anti-gay and racist movies Hollywood made over the decades. John Wayne actually called himself a "white supremacist" in an interview with Playboy. Look at Mickey Rooney playing a "funny" Japanese in Breakfast at Tiffanys. Rooney, Audrey Hepburn and everyone mixed up with that racist production should have be shunned.

Turn on any old movie. You sit there and watch, and it's perfectly nice. Even in the grittiest film noir, there's no obscene language, nudity, sex. Nothing to offend anyone. Then a black character appears, a bellboy or an elevator operator or a maid, and we're subjected to some cruel anti-black stereotype.

Watch Duck Soup. Groucho Marx makes a rude comment about "darkies".

Look at Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind. Feminists have proclaimed her a "feminist heroine". Look at her slapping Butterfly McQueen. How was that racist bitch a "feminist"?

Gibson is also a sadist. He told Franco Zeffirelli that he liked to relax by slaughtering calves on his ranch. Zeffirelli directed Gibson in Hamlet. He discussed this with reporters during the controversy around Gibson's Jesus-being-tortured movie, The Passion of the Christ.

Well, it'll be interesting. Let Gibson make his hyper-violent crypto-Zionist epic. It'll be interesting to see the response.

Kind of like Tom Cruise

You know what it's like? It's like that idiot Tom Cruise. Germany doesn't like Scientology. They consider it a scam or something. So Cruise made that movie about the Nazi officers who tried to blow up Hitler. He figured the Germans couldn't keep him out if he made a movie about Germans trying to blow up Hitler. And his cynical ploy worked.

We'll see if this works as well for Gibson.

Hannakah has become sort of the Jewish Christmas. Hard to imagine a bloody, violent historical epic as the Jewish answer to A Christmas Story or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Breaking Bad's a bit better now

Well, okay, I watched a new episode of Breaking Bad last night. It was pretty good. We learn more about Gus's traumatic past and Walt's dual life as mild mannered terminally ill chemistry teacher and evil drug producer gets him into trouble again.

Did I say this before? One fellow on a message board almost predicted the direction the show was going to take. I foolishly scoffed at his prediction, that Walt's now disabled brother-in-law, a DEA agent, would take care of Gus for him. But...it seems things are moving in that direction.

Why would anyone want to be mixed up in that horrible business? And why are drug lords always so rotten? Is it the long prison sentences they're facing? Maybe not----look at bootleggers during prohibition. Back then the penalties for running booze were rather mild and they were monsters.

There were Soviet and now Russian movies about crime in the Soviet era. Soviet criminals back then could be extremely violent. In Moscow in the '60s, there was a petty thief in Moscow who started murdering his victims with an axe. But you look at the crimes they were committing, they generally weren't getting much out of it. The USSR was truly a socialist society. Even highly successful organized crime bosses didn't live much better than ordinary Soviet people. So why were Soviet criminals so violent? There was no logical reason for it.

The Blue Bird (1976)

I'm sitting here with the old Soviet-American co-production of The Blue Bird on TV. This was sort of a political event when they made this thing in the '70s. They wanted to make something inoffensive, something that neither the Soviets or the Americans would object to, so they made this crap. Based on a play written in 1908. Two children go out searching for the "Blue Bird of Happiness"

I doubt any play for children written in 1908 was any good. No child would choose to watch this thing, and no adult would watch unless they had to take the kids to it.

One of the children is played Todd Lookinland. He bears a striking resemblance to his brother, Mike Lookinland, TV's Bobby Brady. The girl who played his sister went on to appear in Lethal Weapon 2.

The characters have names like Dog, Cat, Night, Sugar, Milk, Water. And on top of that it's a stinking musical. How much disbelief do they expect us to suspend?

The Soviets made great movies. And this thing wasn't that bad. At the time Variety said that it good enough that no one would laugh at it, but it was bad enough that no one would be moved by it.

The Soviets should have done what the Italians did: Lure some American TV actors over, star them in some exploitation films and use them to penetrate the American market. It would have worked. When I was a kid, I watched a number of Soviet, East German and Czech science fiction movies that I assumed were just exceptionally well-made big budget American movies.

George Cukor directed. I'm glad that the Communist movement can't get the blame for it.

David Mamet: As dumb as Jon Voight, only dumber

What have I seen of David Mamet's work? Glengarry Glen Ross? I hated The Untouchables. I saw the movie Homicide which I thought was essentially racist.

Homicide was what it would be like if Mickey Spillane tried to write a serious work about anti-Semitism.

It was about a Jewish detective who comes back to his Jewish heritage while investigating the murder of a Jewish shop owner. He asserts his Jewish identity by joining a JDL-like terrorist group and blowing up a building, and this all happens in a single evening. In interviews, Mamet made it clear that he intended this to be taken seriously.

Normally, a movie in which elderly Jewish shop owners ran guns to Zionists in Palestine and still kept large caches of weapons and explosives on hand in New York would be considered anti-Semitic. And the way black people are portrayed in it is clearly racist. In the end, two black children are arrested for the murder.

It's amazing the garbage people take seriously.

Now Mamet has become a Tea Bagger. He's written his book promoting his new ultra-conservatism. He included Glen Beck in his acknowledgments.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a pretty good review of it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/book-review-the-secret-knowledge-by-david-mamet.html

Here are excerpts of Hitchens' review. He begins:

This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason. In order to be persuaded by it, you would have to be open to propositions like this:

“Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.”

Or this:

“America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.”

Some of David Mamet's unqualified declarations are made even more tersely. On one page affirmative action is described as being “as injust as chattel slavery”; on another as being comparable to the Japanese internment and the Dred Scott decision. We learn that 1973 was the year the United States “won” the Vietnam War, and that Karl Marx — who on the evidence was somewhat more industrious than Sarah Palin — “never worked a day in his life.”...

Propagandistic writing of this kind can be even more boring than it is irritating. For example, Mamet writes in The Secret Knowledge that “the Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all.” Whatever one’s opinion of that conflict may be, this (twice-made) claim of his abolishes any need to analyze or even discuss it. It has a long way to go before it can even be called simplistic. By now, perhaps, you will not be surprised to know that Mamet regards global warming as a false alarm, and demands to be told “by what magical process” bumper stickers can “save whales, and free Tibet.” This again is not uncharacteristic of his pointlessly aggressive style: who on earth maintains that they can? If I were as prone to sloganizing as Mamet, I’d keep clear of bumper-sticker comparisons altogether.

...

...Once or twice, as when he attacks feminists for their silence on Bill Clinton’s sleazy sex life, or points out how sinister it is that we use the word “czar” as a positive term for a political problem-solver, he is unquestionably right, or at least making a solid case. But then he writes: “The BP gulf oil leak . . . was bad. The leak of thousands of classified military documents by Julian Assange on WikiLeaks was good. Why?” This is merely lame, fails to compare like with like, appears unintentionally to be unsure why the gulf leak was “bad” and attempts an irony where none exists....

David Mamet defends Phil Spector

"Feminist" Helen Mirren in pro-woman-killing misogynist film

Al Pacino and Helen Mirren are starring in a made-for-HBO movie being directed by David Mamet. The movie is about Phil Spector and the murder of Lana Clarkson, pictured above.

Pacino plays Spector. Mirren plays one of Spector's elderly friends.

It's rather disgusting. Spector was convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson. Spector liked carrying a gun. It was proven in court that he had a long history of getting drunk, waving his gun around. He liked threatening women with them. He brought Clarkson to his house. She was shot. The gun was in his hand and he immediately confessed to shooting her.

But David Mamet is convinced that Spector is innocent, or he pretends that he's convinced.

Spector's defense was that Clarkson met Spector for the first time, went with him to his house, and suddenly decided to commit suicide with Spector's gun. This was disproven in court. Other women testified that he had put a guns to their heads and threatened to murder them. That was his thing, apparently.

Spector claimed that he couldn't get a fair trial because he was an "outsider" in the music industry.

There's no credible reason for Mamet to believe in Spector's innocence. If there is, he hasn't said what it is. I can guess the real reason, and I'd probably be right, but it'd still be a guess.

And what is wrong with the "feminist" Helen Mirren? She plays one of Spector's friends. Why is she in a movie with a misogynist director defending a woman's murder? Would Mirren have shot herself if her career hadn't gone as well as it had, as Mamet claims Lana Clarkson did? Does she intend to kill herself when her career goes into decline, as it inevitably will if she lives long enough?

The movie is being protested by a group called Friends of Lana Clarkson which I hope will have some effect. They already got Bette Midler to back out of it. She had been set to play Mirren's role.

There was the case recently of several people, convicted as teenagers of committing a horrible murder, being released from prison because they were falsely convicted. In that case, an HBO documentary exposed the utter lack of evidence and the biases of the prosecutors and the community against the impoverished teenagers whom they imagined were "Satanists".

In Spector's case, he's clearly guilty. He had the best defense money can buy, and Mamet has nothing to offer.

Horrifying romantic comedies

I heard an interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation today with Chloe Angyal who wrote an article in The Atlantic about what we can learn about romantic comedies.

You know, he embarrasses her in front of her peers, and she's mortified and tells him in no uncertain terms, for probably the fourth time, to back off. So one of the things that rom-coms teach us is that this persistence, this grand gesture of fighting for the people that you love - it's OK if you humiliate them. It's OK if you, you know, in the real world we might term stalk them - as long as you love them because then it's romantic. And I think that's a harmful message. And that's something that we need to be a little more - we need to sort of view a little more critically.

I've been saying that for years. Romantic comedies are essentially stalker movies. The plots from any of these movies would work perfectly well as slasher films.

I realized this years ago when I was dragged off to see a horrible romantic comedy called Picture Perfect. It starred some woman who was on that show, Friends, I think. I never watched Friends. Her name's Jennifer Aniston.

Here's the plot:

There's this woman. Jennifer Aniston. She's unmarried. She goes to a wedding. Someone takes a picture of her with a guy (Jay Mohr) who's a firefighter by trade.She has a print of the photo.

Jennifer Aniston's boss won't give her a promotion because she's not married, so she blurts out that she's engaged. She shows her boss the picture of her with the fireman. But now her boss demands to meet her fiance.

Jennifer Aniston finds the firefighter. She offers to pay him to pretend to be her fiance. He says he'll do it for free!

He stays with her in her apartment (he's from out of town.) The plan is that they will have dinner with her boss, there will be an argument and they will announce that the engagement is off. But Jay Mohr instead assures the boss that they're going to be married right away!

So this woman has a guy staying in her apartment who insists that she marry him even though they're strangers. She can't get rid of him without losing her job. Imagine this happening in real life. You'd assume this poor woman was in danger.

It reminded me of a call to Dr Harvey Rubin, the radio psychiatrist.

Some guy called into the show. He sounded like a biker or something, with a gravelly voice. He said that he wanted to get married and have children, but he was 40---he was old and didn't have much time! So he bought an engagement ring. Then he went out looking for someone to marry.

He went into a store in a shopping mall. He walked up to the cashier, offered her the ring, explained he was old and didn't have much time, and asked her to marry him.

The girl's mother owned the store. She tried to get rid of him. He refused to leave. She said she would talk to him outside, so he stepped outside and she locked the door and called security.

The guy was clearly deranged. But Dr Rubin played it cool. He cheerfully suggested that he see a psychiatrist or a counselor. The guy didn't think a counselor would help him get a woman, and Dr Rubin told him that a counselor could help him understand why people react as they do.