Cleopatra killed Daniel Boone!

I used to watch re-runs of Daniel Boone when I was a kid. I don't know what I liked so much about it. I tried to watch it again a while back, but I just don't think the real Daniel Boone wore stretch pants.

But I watched a long interview with Fess Parker, who played both Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett before that. He died in 2010. Turns out he was pretty smart. He went to law school, went to USC or UCLA when he moved to LA. He spoke Russian.

He was very tall which may have saved his life. They wouldn't let him be a fighter pilot in the Navy during World War Two. Technically, he was too tall to be in the Navy at all, but they took him.

Daniel Boone was canceled thanks to the hyper-big-budget bomb, Cleopatra, starring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. The studio poured so much money into it, they needed to sell anything they could. Daniel Boone was a top rated show, but the studio stopped production so they could put it into syndication and make some money that way.

Parker had been ripped off by Disney during his years on Davy Crockett. He was supposed to receive 10% of what they made from merchandising. Parker worked a grueling schedule promoting the show. He met with thousands and thousands of children, did frightening, socially awkward work, speaking before the Texas State Lesgislature, appearing at rodeos, shopping centers, visiting hospital pediatric wards.

But, naturally, Disney ripped him off. He said they didn't protect their trademark. Although, I suppose, it would be hard for a corporation to claim the rights to the name of an actual historical figure.

Daniel Boone was in the '60s, and Parker, as a producer of the show, tried to bring in a lot of black actors. He said he was very briefly considered for the role of James Bond, but that would be madness. He owned a winery in his later years and had Goldie Hawn and Jodie Foster bike out there to see him.

Breaking Bad this week

What will happen tomorrow on Breaking Bad?? What will happen tomorrow???

Aw, who gives a crap. It's going on another season anyway. Walter will still be working whatever happens.

Knowing the series is going on kind of ruins it for me.

VCRs hurt my enjoyment of movies. Now you got this clock sitting there on the TV, showing how much of the movie you've seen. You now have a pretty good idea how much time is left in the movie, how much time they still have to wrap it up. You know full well if you're watching a false climax or a real climax.

And now they have these TV ratings. They tell you up front what it's "rated", and why it's rated that way. Is there sex, violence, nudity? You no longer watch TV thinking, "I wonder if she's going to take her clothes off!" They already told you! They've taken away all the suspense.

I've watched movies where I wonder if a tense situation is going to explode in violence. Then I remember, no, no, there was no "V" in the rating.

What do they need this stuff for? Why do parents need to know WHY a show is rated "TVPG"? Do they want their kids watch violence but no sex, or sex and no violence? Do they not mind them seeing sex and nudity but don't want them hearing indecent language? But parents got their panties in a bunch because the original TV ratings just gave a general rating. You'd think they would be embarrassed to announce to the world that they're perfectly happy for their children to see inappropriate sex or violence, just not both.

Well, anyway, I'm not sure what's happening. Is Gus nice or mean? Hank was slightly rude last week but is still nice. Skyler was nice for a change. Walt, Jr., was speaking of ill of his father.

How old is Walt, Jr, anyway? He was in high school when the show started. It's been on a for a few years now. But he just had his 16th birthday---at least they just bought him a car for his birthday. Maybe time is supposed to be compressed. Or maybe they waited until he was 23 to buy him a car. Why would anyone buy a car for a 16-year-old?

And Walt, Jr., looks pretty athletic. He's not on crutches in real life. In the early shows, the other kids were picking on him because of his disability, but he's this big, athletic guy in his mid-20s now. He looks like he could beat the crap out of any high school kid.

But...no....I still care! I must know what happens next!

Does Gus realize that Jesse was in on a plot to kill him? He must know Walt's in on it. Did Walt poison Brock?

The fellow who plays Gus said in an interview that the reason Gus stops and doesn't get in the car is that he knows that HE didn't poison Brock and that he's been lured there. Which means he knows that Jesse lured him there. And he must figure that Walt poisoned Brock.

Oh, well. My hope is that they will all be arrested and given a fair trial with a jury of their peers. Then, in prison, they will be rehabilitated and released.

A book Hemingway didn't care for

Here’s Ernest Hemingway in a letter to Charles Scribner attacking James Jones and his first novel, From Here to Eternity. The book won the National Book Award for fiction in 1952. Scribner published both Hemingway and Jones:

About the James Jones book … It is not great no matter what they tell. To me is an enormously skillful fuck-up and his book will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read it again and give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs; nor suck a boil to know it is a boil; nor swim through a river of snot to know it is snot. I hope he kills himself as soon as it does not damage your sales. If you give him a literary tea you might ask him to drain a bucket of snot and then suck the puss out of a dead-nigger’s ear… How did they ever get a picture of a wide-eyed jerk (un-damaged ears) to look that screaming tough. I am glad he makes you money and I would never laugh him off. I would just give him a bigger bucket of the snot detail. He has the psycho’s urge to kill himself and he will do it. Make all the money you can out of him as quickly as you can and hold out enough for Christian Burial. Wouldn’t have brought him up if you hadn’t asked me. Now I feel as unclean as when I read his fuck-off book. It has all the charm and trueness of the real and imitation fuck-off. Mary sends her love to you and to Vera. Best always, Papa.

Hemingway's comments were rather unkind, quite disgusting and racist. He had that anti-Semitism problem with The Sun Also Rises and now this. He's the Rick Perry of American literature. And why the hyphen between the words "dead" and the racial slur?

Now that I know that From Here to Eternity damaged the country, I think I should read it. Especially now that the gay sex scenes, cut out when it was first published, have been restored.

Interesting that Hemmingway, who went on to commit suicide, called for Jones to die this way.

I got this quote off the Counterpunch website.

On The Office: James Spader stinks

Found this on a TV Guide website:

Just what is supposed to be amusing about new Dunder Mifflin CEO Robert California? And, by the way, why is he spending so much time in Scranton? Two episodes into the new season, Spader has yet to deliver anything resembling a laugh-out-loud punchline. He's mostly just played mind games with his employees, attempting to turn them against one another and making wild demands for sales increases.

The Office's writers seem to be confusing funny ha-ha with funny-strange — and not for the first time. (Will Ferrell's Deangelo Vickers, we hardly knew ye, thank God.) Spader successfully straddled the line between comedy and drama for years on Boston Legal. Surely, he can't be so serious on a sitcom.

What do you think of James Spader on The Office?

I have to agree. Nothing funny there.

The American version of The Office seems too much like a sit-com. The British version managed to maintain the reality TV show thing.

Ray Carney, Walter White, Breaking Bad, etc

I read something by Ray Carney. I probably misunderstood it.

He complains about subjectivity in film.

http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/acad/forms.shtml

The idea is that, in general, we see things through the eyes of the protagonist, what their goals and intentions are.

I suppose that's the reason we can watch Dirty Harry without thinking, "My God! Clint Eastwood is a monster!" The reason we watch romantic comedies without thinking, "He's a stalker! That poor girl needs to get a restraining order and a can of pepper spray!"

I think you sort of got a hint of this in the movie Election. We never quite saw the narrator, the teacher, as the innocent victim he thought he was. When his actions come to light, he tells us that nobody remembered all the good things he did, and we wonder what he's referring to.

And now...and now...

And now we have Breaking Bad.

There were a couple of points in recent episodes where subjective intentions didn't count for anything. There was the scene of Walt lying in the crawl space, Skyler having just told him that she gave the money to her former boss.

We understand why she did it. But lying there in the crawl space, all Walter knows is that she gave a vast amount of his money, made at tremendous personal risk, to her former lover.

Earlier in that scene, we see Walt getting into a fight with Jesse. Jesse says accusingly that Walt brought his DEA agent brother-in-law to their lab! Which is sort of true. We understand why Walt did it. We understand what he was doing, but how would Jesse or Gus know?

I don't know what Walter's appeal was. I guess he only killed bad people, at least at first.

There was a case in 2010. A high school teacher named Valerie Elizabeth “Liz” Parrish was arrested for producing methamphetamine. She was trying to raise money to get her boyfriend out of jail. More recently, a school in West Virginia was closed down when traces of meth were found throughout the building. The principal and a teacher were arrested.

When we hear this, do we think that maybe these meth-producing teachers might be like that nice Walter White we see on TV?

Breaking Bad yet again

Breaking Bad Fine Art Print by Rick Forston, available for sale here
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/breaking-bad-rick-fortson.html


It's the only thing I watch now. The only current TV series. But what will happen this week?

Last week, Gus tells Walter he's fired. Jesse is "cooking" for him now. But Gus can't kill Walter like he wants because Jesse would refuse to work for him if he did. He tells Walt that he's going to have his brother-in-law, Hank, murdered and, if Walter tries to stop him, he'll have Walter's wife, son and baby daughter killed.

Walt runs to Saul, his lawyer. He wants to disappear with his family. Saul previously said that he "knows a guy" who can help them vanish. Saul tells him how much it will cost.

Walt races home. He goes into the crawl space under the house. But where is the money? There's not enough!

His wife Skyler explains that she gave several hundred thousand to her former employer with whom she had been having an affair. She did this because he had been audited by the IRS. If he didn't pay the back taxes he owed, he would be arrested for tax evasion and, as his accountant, she would be investigated as well and the IRS would then discover that she was laundering Walt's meth money.

The last episode ended with Walter lying in his crawl space becoming hysterical.

And in the promo for next weeks episode, we hear Walter confessing to...well. Something. He says he's done bad things since his diagnosis. Is he going to confess to his actual crimes or talk about his phony gambling problem? And who was he telling this to anyway?

I watched a teaser on Hulu. I don't know what's going on. Walter says it's time to stop putting off the inevitable. Looks like he and Skyler are in a motel and Walt's going out with a suitcase to go take his medicine, so to speak. But it didn't sound like he was going to turn himself in, and if he did, it would defeat the purpose of everything he did which was to make money to leave to his family.

I'm getting the impression that this was intended as the conclusion to the series and that they're going to tack on one more season.

I read a Breaking Bad message board a few weeks ago. I think I mentioned this before. I scoffed at one fellow who thought that Walter would go to Hank to get Gus. I scoffed. Hank was in terrible shape and how could he go along with his brother-in-law's terrible crimes?

But...now....

The Mexican cartel was after Walt. They're now gone, killed off by Gus. Now Gus is after Walt. But Hank is already onto Gus and now the DEA knows that SOMEBODY is gunning for Hank (Saul said he wouldn't mention Gus's name when he tipped off the DEA.)

Well, I'll see in about 13 hours.

But, what a miserable life! The guy works for months making a fortune for Gus. He's getting paid himself but he can't spend the money and he knows that Gus will murder him the first chance he gets. The idea was to make money to leave to his family.

And another thing!

I didn't like the poetic justice in the accidental death of Skyler's former boss. I guess it was a problem. They (the writers and producers of the show) couldn't let him live because he was blackmailing Skyler and they needed a logical way out, but they couldn't murder him because it was known that he'd been sleeping with Skyler and Walt was down there threatening him.

All Fall Down, Hud, Shane, and Brandon de Wilde

There were two movies Brandon de Wilde starred in, Hud and All Fall Down, which seemed so similar although the settings were completely different. They were probably different enough that I wouldn't have noticed the similarities if de Wilde hadn't been in both.

In both movies, he plays a youth who looks up to an older good-looking degenerate relative---his older brother played by Warren Beatty in All Fall Down and his uncle Hud played by Paul Newman in Hud. They both end with his getting over it.

All Fall Down was based on the novel by James Leo Herlihy. He also wrote the play Blue Denim, also made into a movie starring de Wilde, then 17, as a teenage boy trying to get an illegal abortion for his girlfriend played by Carol Lynley.

Herlihy also wrote the novel Midnight Cowboy.

Another person also noted the similar theme in Shane in which de Wilde, 10, idolizes the gun fighter played by Alan Ladd.

De Wilde was only 30 when he died in a car accident in 1972.