This Island Earth

I saw the movie on video tape years ago. I sat there with a friend watching it. The box in the video store talked about how many years it took them to produce. It was a big budget science fiction epic in its day. Rex Reason said he was pleased that it was the subject of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. It inspired the Coneheads on Saturday Night Live. Aliens walk around with big heads and no one notices, or at least no one has the bad taste to mention it.

But it wasn't quite as entertaining as you'd think.

Rex Reason plays a scientist who goes to secret lab in Georgia where other scientists are working for the aliens. The day he arrives, the aliens are ordered to blow up their lab and return to their home planet. Reason and his scientist ex-girlfriend are taken aboard the flying saucer. They fly to their home planet which takes very little time. They're only there a few minutes. The planet is about to be destroyed so they jump back on the flying saucer and head back to Earth.

Reason is the main character, but he's simply dragged from place to place. Hell, I could do that. He watches helplessly as his girlfriend is attacked by a giant insect-like mutant. When he's finally able to run to her rescue, the mutant has died on his own.

Someone noted that it was pro-nuclear.

Rex Reason should have beaten up a few aliens.

Angus T Jones' recent conversion: The kid has a point

The boy won't end up like Charlie Sheen, but will he repeat Kirk Cameron's mistakes?

Angus recently became a Seventh Day Adventist. He wasn't sure if he wanted to continue on Two and a Half Men anyway. It's been eleven years, he's nineteen and has been accepted by some colleges. He put out a video. He smiles and laughs slightly as he asks people not to watch the show because he doesn't want to be on it anymore. 

Two and a Half Men is rather filthy. I'm not saying I don't watch it, but it's filthy.

I read that they used to have to keep cutting away from Angus while filming because he would always laugh at the jokes. He understood them even when he was eight or nine. At the beginning, the actors would apologize to his mother for all the stuff they had to say in front of her child, but she didn't care.

I watched an interesting video of Angus being interviewed on a show for the Seventh Day Adventist Church. He said he attended Christian schools all these years. When he was accepted by colleges, he wasn't sure what he wanted to do, if he wanted to go back to Three and a Half Men. He was talking to a friend, a poor kid, strangely, who told him that because of the money involved, he would definitely do the show.

In the interview, he sounded quite normal. There are people on the internet talking about it as if he's joined a cult.

Angus says he's a virgin. I don't know why I care, but good for him. But he shouldn't have said this publicly. Now the hyenas in the press will keep asking him if he's still a virgin, and when he gets tired of answering, they'll take it as a "no".

It was silly for Kirk Cameron to get whatever religious undergarment he wore into a twist over the immorality of Growing Pains. Alan Thicke told him that if it was "too blue" for him, he should get a show on a Christian cable network. But Angus has a point about Two and a Half Men.

50 Years of James Bond

Ian Flemming

A long article on James Bond, going into the political and psychological elements of the series, by the late Alexander Cockburn:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/23/50-years-of-james-bond-2/

Talks as much about the novels and Ian Fleming as the movies.

There were Fleming's psychological issues, all the father figures that appear in the books. There was the fact that the women in the books are basically men in disguise:

Of course there was dutiful mention of Vesper’s “fine” breasts but Fleming does not seem to have been too interested in them. Four years later in From Russia With Love, Fleming scurries past Tatiana Romanova’s breasts with a mumbled “faultless” before assuming a hotly didactic tone on the matter of her ass: “A purist would have disapproved of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man’s". A year later, after publication of Dr No, Noel Coward wrote to Fleming, saying that he was slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile’s bottom was like a boy’s. “I know that we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?”

Hitchcock's earliest known surviving work on line

  Recognize this nice young man?

The White Shadow (1924), Alfred Hitchcock's earliest known surviving work, is available for viewing online at the U.S. National Film Preservation Foundation's website:

http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/the-white-shadow-1924

A copy of the film was recently discovered in a film archive in New Zealand. Alfred Hitchcock was credited as writer, assistant director, art director and editor.

 
Hitchcock wanted to be an artist, but his parents pressured him into getting a degree in engineering. He took his portfolio to the movie studio trying to get a job drawing pictures to go on the title cards.

He was only 24 when this film was made.
 
The White Shadow was the first film on which he worked with his then-future wife, Alma Reville.

You can watch other silent films on the website.

Grizzly Man, Elephant in the Living Room

There was a horrible case about twenty-five years ago. Three eleven-year-old boys broke into the Prosepect Park zoo in Brooklyn to go wading in the shallow mote around the Polar Bear enclosure. One kid changed his mind and didn't go in. One scaled the fence and the other squeezed through the bars. One was killed and partially eaten while the other escaped.

The kids may have thought the bears would sleep through it. I don't know if they imagined themselves swimming with the polar bears.

It's possible that children's books with all the anthropomorphized animals played a role in it. If they did, kids aren't the only ones who've fallen for it.

There are two vaguely related documentaries about men and the extremely dangerous animals they love. One is Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man about Timothy Treadwell, a former junkie and failed actor who spent thirteen summers in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska communing with the Grizzlies--he had cute names for them, he would touch them, play with their cubs. The other is Elephant in the Living Room, about people who keep dangerous exotic animals as pets.


Grizzly Man

Much of Grizzly Man was footage shot by Treadwell himself. He was out there alone, or he tried to make it appear he was alone. He would mount the camera on a tripod and kneel in front of it with the bears in the background. One of the first shots was his explaining that if he showed any fear at all, the bears would kill him for sure. But all he had to do was face them down and show he wasn't afraid and the bears would respect him.

I don't know where he got that idea. Did someone tell him that, or did he make it up?

Treadwell claimed that he was protecting the bears from poachers. Park Rangers said that there were no poachers, that there hadn't been even a single case of poaching at the park and they considered his actions to be wildlife harassment.

An Indian they interviewed who ran a museum thought it was terrible. For thousands of years, they had kept their distance. They avoided bears and the bears avoided them.

Now Treadwell was getting them accustomed to human contact. They wouldn't know to run away if they did encounter poachers, and they might approach humans looking for food which could result in their having to be killed.

I'm not giving anything away when I tell you that Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were eventually killed and eaten by a grizzly bear .

Herzog says in the narration:

"...what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. In this blank stare speaks only of a half bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior."

Treadwell had gone to Hollywood to become an actor. Appeared on Love Connection. He auditioned for the role Woody Harrelson got on Cheers but came in second, whatever that means. Instead of taking heart that he had come so close, it sent him into a downward spiral of alcoholism and drug addiction.

At one point, he told people he was an Australian orphan, but his phony accent was very bad. He had bangs to conceal his receding hairline. He often has a bandana around his head.

Before he leaves at the end of the summer, he speaks to the camera. He stops to fix his hair. Then starts again. He does multiple takes on his videos:

"...I came here and protected the animals as best as I could. In fact, I'm the ONLY protection for these animals out here. The government flying over for a grand total of two times in two months. How DARE they! How DARE they challenge me! How dare they smear me with their campaigns! How dare they when they do not look after these animals and I come here in peace and in love, neutral, in respect.

"I will continue to do this. I will FIGHT them. I will be an American dissident if need be. There is a patriotic time going on right now, but as far as this fucking government is concerned, FUCK YOU, motherfucking Park Service!" Herzog cut out the audio here as Treadwell attacks Park Service employees by name. "I BEAT YOUR FUCKING ASSES! I PROTECTED THE ANIMALS! FUCK YOU!"

He and his girlfriend go to another campsite, the one where they will finally be killed. Treadwell makes another video a few days before his death:

"...Am I a great person? I don't know. I don't know. We're ALL great people. Everyone has something in them that's wonderful. I'm just different. I love these bears enough to do it right. And I'm edgy enough and I'm tough enough, but mostly I love these bears enough to survive and do it right. And I'm never giving this up. Never giving it up. Never giving up the maze. Never. This is it. This is my life. This is my land!"

The Elephant in the Living Room

The other documentary, The Elephant in the Living Room, about people who collect dangerous, exotic animals. Poisonous snakes, lions, tigers, bears, elephants, mountain lions.

A man's pet lions got free and were running loose near a freeway. Children find an African snake, one of the most deadly in the world, and play with it, hanging it around their necks. Finally, animal control people arrive, realize what it is and are horrified.

The film focuses on an older man, the one who owned the escaped lions. He had been in an accident and suffered extreme depression and chronic pain until he got the lions. This was why he was so attached to them, why animal control officers couldn't convince him to part with them. He does give them up, though, after a terrible accident. Even before that, he says that he wouldn't go through it again, becoming so attached to such huge, dangerous animals that required so much care.


There was an article in the local paper several years ago. A woman traveled to Kenya. She was so happy to be there. It was evening and she started to walk out into the savannah. She walked until a Land Rover appeared. Officers jumped out and arrested her. Walking around out there was extremely dangerous and illegal. She was horrified because she was facing thousands of dollars in fines and she simply didn't have the money.

 The officers decided to drop the charges, they told her, because she was a "stupid white person."

Africans don't befriend lions. Indians don't keep cobras as pets. American Indians don't frolic with bears.


Both films are available for instant viewing on Netflix.

This is the last thing about Justin Bieber

I watched it on You Tube. Justin Bieber at the American Music Awards. He walks up on stage. A forty-year-old matron called Jenny McCarthy kisses him. The male presenter kindly rubs his hand on Bieber's cheek to remove the lipstick. The boy is alarmed by the gesture and steps back toward McCarthy who violently grabs him by the throat. Bieber is grimacing as McCarthy kisses him again. Then she grabs his bottom.

Imagine a couple of middle aged men doing this to, say, Taylor Swift, or to a high school girl waiting for a bus.

Bieber then "joked" that he felt violated. I'm sure he did feel violated.

It's not Justin Bieber's fault he's adorable. He's trying to make himself less so by covering himself in tattoos and wearing unattractive hats.

He unwisely dedicated his award to all the "haters" who said his career would never last. He'll look terribly foolish if his tweenage fans suddenly turn on him. The day will come when he'll be playing in a lounge in Reno, a washed up former star. It happens to all of them if they last long enough.

Frank Sinatra had an embarrassing lull in the middle of his career.

And, by the way, I never understood the Elvis Presley cult. The guy was a sell-out. He quit music and did nothing but a movie theme song every few years, and he did it strictly for the money. 

Never wear a hat that's bigger than your head

Justin Bieber needs a smaller hat. Look at how tiny his head looks. The rest of that outfit looks like something an old woman would wear, at least in this picture. I'm sure if the camera were zoomed out more his ensemble would look somewhat more masculine.

Kids used to walk around wearing sailor hats. They were cute:

There are so many better choices: