Dante's Inferno, 1911

Watched the 1911 Italian version of Dante's Inferno. 100-years-young!

It was strangely refreshing----filmed entirely static camera, in long shot. They would have a title explaining what was happening, then we'd see it happen. Strangely, it made it seem more naturalistic. They just told you what was happening. No montage or pantomime to reveal information.

http://youtu.be/zyeDtwbACgg

It's all there on You Tube. There's part one of five.

Near death experiences then and now

I heard some lecture which was being used as background noise an alternative music record. The guy talked about how, today, when people have near-death experiences, they almost always imagine themselves going to heaven running toward the light. But he said that, in medieval times, when people had these experiences, they always found themselves in Hell. They would come back trying to live better lives.

I've had atheists who must have had some doubts about their atheism because they said they thought that, if it turned out that there was a God, He would understand their disbelief.

But this movie----people went to Hell for pretty much anything. Gluttons were in hell. And, oddly, spendthrifts and misers both suffered the same fate. Harpies were there. Is that a sin? There was a man who committed suicide after being tortured and blinded---he was in hell. And there were heretics and blasphemers, of course. Oh, and hypocrites. Pretty much everybody went to hell in those days.

In which I tie together Daniel Boone and Breaking Bad

There was an episode of Daniel Boone directed by the great B director, Joseph Lewis. Lewis had directed the movie Gun Crazy, filmed the first implied oral sex scene in Hollywood history and directed a lot of episodes of the Rifleman.

The original script for the Daniel Boone episode he directed called for a coincidence. Daniel Boone runs into some woman in town. She runs away. He meets her again in the country somewhere. Was she an escaped indentured servant? I don't know.

Lewis didn't like this. He changed the script. Daniel Boone sees her in town, she runs away. As he heads home, Boone uses his tracking skills to follow and find her.

Lewis didn't like having coincidence in his scripts. He wanted his characters to make things happen using their special skills.

And this was a weakness of some episodes of Breaking Bad. Skyler was being blackmailed by her boss. And how is this solved? Half by her actions, half by accident. She goes to Saul, for some reason Saul knows two goons who he sends to her former boss's house. They force him to write a check to the IRS. They Fed Ex the check. Then they plan to hold the guy until the check clears.

But the fellow panics, makes a run for it, trips and falls, and, strangely, the fall kills him.

There was the scene in the desert where Walt and Jesse are held in a house by Tuco, the violent, unbalanced local drug lord. Walt and Jesse are trying to figure out how to kill him. They want to poison him by coaxing him into taking some methamphetamine, but he won't do it. His elderly grandfather, sitting in a wheelchair unable to speak, keeps ringing his bell.

"Why are you ringing the bell? Oh my God! They're trying kill me!"

He starts beating up Jesse.

Walter sees Jesse has a rock in his hand.

Walter distracts Tuco. His grandfather was trying to tell him "THAT WE WERE GOING TO POISON YOU BECAUSE YOU'RE A PSYCHO AND YOU DESERVE TO DIE!"

And Jesse hits him with a rock.

But it's Hank, Walters DEA agent brother-in-law who pulls up, gets into a gun fight with Tuco and kills him.

I don't know. Should they have had Walter get out of it with his superior intellect alone? It would have meant they'd need another reason why the Mexican drug cartel wanted to murder Hank. Of course, it was Hank's skill as an investigator that led him there---THAT wasn't a coincidence.

Should Skyler have used her accounting skills to neutralize the threat from her former employer? The death in a freak accident was a bit much.

Obama gearing up to attack Iran, apparently

Well, Obama is gearing up to attack Iran, spreading his absurd lie, that Iran sent a used car dealer to Mexico to somehow locate the head of a Mexican drug cartel so he could hire them to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

Does anyone outside the U.S. government believe this? Does anyone inside the U.S. government believe it?

Today I listened to a couple of "experts" on NPR's Talk of the Nation. A woman finally called in and asked them why they didn't consider the possibility that the U.S. government was lying to justify starting a war. The host, Neal Conan, couldn't understand----why would the United States want to attack Iran? We've already started so many other wars! It wouldn't make sense to start another!

Patrick Coburn wrote about it on the Counterpunch website:

The claim that Iran employed a used-car salesman with a conviction for cheque fraud to hire Mexican gangsters to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington goes against all that is known of Iran’s highly sophisticated intelligence service.

The confident announcement of this bizarre plot by the US Attorney General Eric Holder sounds alarmingly similar to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious claim before the UN in 2003 that the US possessed irrefutable evidence Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

The problem is that the US government has very publicly committed itself to a version of events, however unlikely, that, if true, would be a case for war against Iran. It will be difficult for the US to back away from such allegations now.

Could the accusations be true? The plot as described in court was puerile, easy to discover and unlikely to succeed. A Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant in Corpus Christi, Texas, with supposed links to Los Zetas gangsters in Mexico, said he had been approached by an Iranian friend of his aunt called Mansour Arbabsiar to hire the Zetas to make attacks. A link is established with the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

None of this makes sense. The IRGC is famous for making sure that responsibility for its actions can never be traced to Iran. It usually operates through proxies. Yet suddenly here it is sending $100,000 (£63,000) from a known IRGC bank account to hire assassins in Mexico. The beneficiaries from such a plot are evident. There will be those on the neo-con right and extreme supporters of Israel who have long been pressing for a war with Iran. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have been vociferously asserting that Iran is orchestrating Shia pro-democracy protests, but without finding many believers in the rest of the world. Their claims are now likely to be taken more seriously in Washington. There will be less pressure on countries like Bahrain to accommodate their Shia populations.

In Iraq, the US and Britain were always seeing Iran’s hidden hand supporting their opponents, but they could never quite prove it. It was also true, to a degree never appreciated in the US, that Washington and Tehran were at one in getting rid of Saddam Hussein and installing a Shia government. There were points in common and a struggle for influence. The same has been true in Afghanistan, where Iran was delighted to see the anti-Shia Taliban overthrown in 2001.

Some Iran specialists suggest there might be a “rogue faction” within the Revolutionary Guard, but there is no evidence such a body exists or of a convincing motive for it to be associating with Mexican gangsters.

The Maccabees were jerks

Okay, since Mel Gibson is making this Maccabee movie, here's something by Israeli Uri Avnery about it. I got it from Counterpunch, and you can read the whole thing here.

...Many years ago I had lunch with someone who was then a key figure in the Israeli economy. During the conversation I suggested that Shimon Bar Kochba, who led the failed Jewish uprising against Rome, in 132-135 C.E., was a crazy adventurer, that the Zealots of the Great Revolt who had preceded him were criminals and that the Maccabees too, before them, had fought a murderous civil war.

The banker stared at me with a look of endless astonishment in his clear blue eyes. He had never heard such strange views. On the spot, I decided to write a series of articles on the subject. They were published serially in Haolam Hazeh, and did not cause an uproar.

Some time later, however, Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former head of Military Intelligence and at the time a historian at the Hebrew University, wrote a book in the same vein, and the dam burst.

The Zealots’ rebellion against Rome, he wrote, was an act of madness. In present-day terms, they could be called extreme right-wingers. Sensible people such as King Herod Agrippa II warned about the futility of the adventure against the huge military might of the Roman superpower. But the Zealots silenced those voices, murdered whoever spoke against the revolt and seized control over the Jewish community. When the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem, in 70 C.E., Zealot groups burned one another’s stores of grain, certain that they were not needed because the Almighty himself would redeem his holy city.

One of the sensible people who remained in the city-gone-mad was Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai; he rightly predicted what would happen. Ben Zakkai pretended to be dead, had himself smuggled out of town in a coffin, approached the Roman commander and requested permission to settle in Yavneh and open a spiritual center there.

This was out-and-out treason: deserting the front, cowardice, maintaining contact with the enemy, collaboration. When I was an adolescent, I was a member of the Irgun pre-state underground, and we organized a mock trial for him. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. The Zealots were our heroes.

But the Jewish people’s collective wisdom in fact hailed Ben-Zakkai’s treason. His move is widely seen as enabling the survival of Judaism during the 2,000 years of Diaspora. In other words: His treason saved the people. His act was the patriotic one. The Jewish community was able to remain on its land and flourish until the appearance of the next madman, Bar Kochba, another member of the extreme right, to use today’s terminology.

The historical verdict on the Maccabees is more positive. They are favorably etched in the Jewish consciousness, whereas the Zealots’ activities are recalled in the mourning of Tisha B’Av. The Maccabees’ activities, on the other hand, are celebrated during the holiday of Hanukkah, and the Zionist movement has hailed them as freedom fighters who liberated the Jews from oppressive alien rulers.

And indeed, in contrast with the Zealots and Bar Kochba, the Maccabees had a realistic view of the political situation of their day. They made alliances and managed the rebellion wisely. But the Maccabees’ war, in the second century B.C.E., was first and foremost a civil war. We say the Maccabees conducted a murderous campaign against the Hellenists – but who were the Hellenists? They were the people who adopted the most enlightened and advanced culture of their day, approximately equivalent to American or general Western culture today.

The “national religious” camp of those days and the counterparts of today’s “hilltop youth” regarded the Hellenists as traitors, precisely the way today’s leftists are branded. (This, however, did not stop the Hasmonaean kings, who succeeded the Maccabees, from adopting Greek culture themselves, as some of their names show ).

William Beaudine

I've seen several movies directed by William Beaudine. I thought they were pretty good. The worst of them were fairly well-made.

Beaudine was a silent film director. He directed Sparrows with Mary Pickford and a young Milton Berle. But his career went bad. He traveled to England, it did him no good. He finally began directing B movies and was extremely prolific.

He went on to direct a low budget exploitation film about unwed pregnancy which ended with a shot of the actual birth of a baby. He directed Spin & Marty on The Mickey Mouse Club and episodes of Lassie and The Green Hornet.

But the Michael Medved and his less successful brother, Harry, trashed Beaudine in one of their books. Anyone who reads the book then watched any of Beaudine's movies would be surprised at how dishonest the Medved boys were. They falsely claimed that he was known as "One Shot" Beaudine. In fact, they were the only ones who ever called him that.

In any case, in B movie production, as in television, you didn't shoot retakes unless you had to. If you could shoot a scene in a single take, you would. There was no time or money for retakes.

I've seen quite a few of Beaudine's movies. I didn't see any of the technical flaws the Medveds claimed.

Their attack in him seemed to be based entirely on the fact that he directed B movies. He brought them in on time and on budget and did quite well considering the limitations. What would a better director have done?

I have community access TV again

I got my Community Access TV back again. I switched back to cable and got rid of the satellite dish. It all stinks, of course. It costs a lot and even with 80 channels, there's nothing on.

I watched the tail end of a video of a TV writer discussing his craft followed by an elderly movie producer who got his start in B movies in the 1940s talk about his career.

A few years ago, I tried to work out how to do a dramatic series on Community Access TV. Several people have done locally produced soap operas over the years, but I was never able to follow them.

One of these amateur soap operas was on for several years, has a page on imdb.com and had several actors go on to bigger and better things. The producer was a young fellow who had been a child actor and played Neo Harrington on Days of Our Lives. At 12, he appeared in a martial arts movie.

That soap opera started out very well, but got worse and worse over the years. I've never talked to anyone involved, but I suspect it was all the work, week after week, of arranging schedules, getting actors together when no one is getting paid and everyone has a job and a life to work around. In the end, the show consisted of almost nothing but scenes of actors alone on camera talking to themselves or talking on the phone about their situation, which I was never able to follow anyway.

I rented two quasi soaps on DVD, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, the soap opera spoof produced by Norman Lear, and Dark Shadows, the gothic soap opera from the late '60s.

Dark Shadows seemed to consist almost entirely of conversations between two people at a time. It was filmed "live on tape"---it was videotaped as if it were a live TV show. They never shot re-takes. They left in flubbed lines, scenes of actors trying remember their lines, microphones and studio equipment appearing on camera. It's amazing that they did so well, really.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman had a bit more going on. I did notice it had scenes that went on for twenty minutes and episodes that had only two or three characters appear.

Watching videos of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, a British sketch comedy show where all the sketches have only Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.

Along those lines, there was a Community Access TV show called Two Kids with a Camcorder which had two teenagers doing what teenagers think is funny. The show was generally cute.

Come to think of it, there were two English guys on You Tube who did a pretty good video, maybe 20 minutes long. The thing is, it was just the two of them. They didn't even have anyone to operate the camera for them, all the scenes were doing with only one of them appearing on camera at a time, sometimes in disguise if they were playing a different character. Poor guys didn't get as many views as they deserved and I wasn't able to find their video last time I looked.

There was a group of college students who had a long-running sketch comedy show. It was a bit controversial. A local cop turned on the TV while getting ready for work and had it on.

"I was in the Army and I've been a cop for sixteen years, and I didn't know there were that many words for masturbation," he said.

What are these soldiers and cops doing that make them think their experts on euphemisms for masturbation?

Anyway, there was nothing anyone could do. They can only ban legally obscene material from public access TV. Everything else stays.

There was once a live broadcast from the studio. Some local anarchists thought they were making some brilliant political point by showing naked women mud wrestling. Maybe they were attacking repressive attitudes toward sex? I guess. But that was their downfall because the feminists turned against them and their group disintegrated.

The public access TV station is in the back of the high school, so outraged school officials stole the mud wrestling videotape from the station and spent several days watching it in outrage until they were finally forced to give it back.

Breaking Bad season finale

The season finale of Breaking Bad was on last night. Everything seemed to be wrapped up, like this was intended as the series finale. Jesse and Walt shake hands and go their separate ways. They both have their money, Walt also has a car wash. He had calculated how much he was going to need to leave his family when he died, and he has that much left. Surely, after all they've been through, these two won't go back into it.

Only thing would be trying to stay one step ahead of the law for the murders they committed over the last few seasons. Maybe Walt sees his chance to become a kingpin himself.

But I'm afraid next season will be like the final season or Roseanne. It just went on one year too many.

But it was a great episode! One extremely disturbing scene and a happy ending. Even the secretary got in on it. Walt pays her $25,000 for Saul's phone number after he disappears.

Walt did poison a child, as a number of viewers guessed, but the kid pulled through fine and doctors weren't surprised or baffled by the poisoning. They figured the kid ate a berry he shouldn't have.

Near the end, the family is gathered around the TV watching news. Skyler talks to Walt. She tells him what happened. She takes the phone where nobody can hear.

"Walt---was this you?"

"I won."

But this series seems to have run its course. There's no plausible way Walt or Jesse would willingly return to this work.