Poor Justin Bieber

I was surprise how sad I was to hear the news. Justin Bieber had been arrested. The boy had been driving drunk, had smoked marijuana and taken prescription drugs and was racing on a residential street in Miami. He was in a Lamborghini and was racing a Ferrari.
 
They used a couple of SUVs the block the street so they could race.

"I ain't got no fucking weapons," Bieber told the police officer. "Why do you have to search me? What the fuck is this about?"

Why wasn't I glad the little puke got arrested?

He smiled for his mug shot, but looked more plaintive in the profile shot.

I've never listened to his music, never heard any song of his to the bitter end. I saw him in a skit at the end of an episode of Saturday Night Live and watched him being gunned down on YouTube.

I just hope they take his license before he kills somebody. He's being advised to check into rehab even if he doesn't think he needs to. I think he should move back home with his mother. And see a dermatologist about tattoo removal. I wonder if the court can order him to drive only a slightly underpowered mid-size sedan.

On CSI pretending to have his hands cuffed behind his back.

The North Star

I'm sitting here with the pro-Soviet Hollywood movie The North Star on TV, written by Lillian Hellman, produced during World War Two. You want to know what's weird. Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network kept showing this movie when it first started broadcasting. Ayn Rand denounced it before House Un-American Activities Committee as Communist propaganda because it showed Russians smiling. Russians smile in Soviet propaganda, she explained, and they smiled in this, so, obviously... (Actually, they were Ukrainians.)

It was propaganda, of course. The U.S. government asked Warner Brothers to produce it for that purpose.

Kids are now singing a song they made us sing in grade school. I knew the Communist origins of This Land Is Your Land, but not this. Man, I hated that song.

I did see another pro-Soviet American movie. There were women snipers in the Soviet Red Army including Lyudmila Mykhailivna Pavlichenko who was credited with killing 309 Nazis including 39 German snipers. The Soviets only gave you credit for killing a Nazi if someone else witnessed it, so she very likely killed twice that many. She had been wounded more than once and was pulled out of combat the last time. Here's Woody Guthrie's song about her.

There were around 2,000 women snipers in the Soviet Red Army, and only a quarter survived the war.

The movie was a comedy. I don't remember who starred in it----it was Eve Arden as the Russian sniper. She was completely unconvincing as a Russian. It was inspired by Pavlichenko's visit to the U.S. during the war. She jokes about how many Nazis she killed. Her mother would kill a dozen before breakfast.

The eight biggest box office failures

Something called Wall St. Cheatsheet ran a list of the eight biggest money-losing movies. I never heard of most of them. Movies that cost a fortune to produce and some grossed quite a bit at the box office but had no chance of making back their massive investment:

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/the-8-biggest-film-box-office-disasters-of-all-time.html/?ref=tbla

Ron Howard's production of The Alamo came in second place. Adjusting for inflation, it lost only half a million dollars less than Cutthroat Island. It had a total cost of $145 million. Ron Howard was going to direct, but he wanted to spend $200 million on it and they wouldn't give it to him. They made it for less than half that, then spent millions more on distribution. Maybe if they had spent that extra hundred million dollars it would have been a smashing success but I can't imagine it.

The "martyrs" of the Alamo were fighting mainly for slavery. You already knew how the thing was going to end. John Wayne directed a version in 1960 and it was a massive failure.

Looking at imdb.com, there were a lot of Texans who loved the movie and thought they were being persecuted because nobody else liked it. There is a political component to it. Texas is now full of idiot secessionists, some of them criminal scum, some of them Tea Baggers. You can't take the movie completely out of that context.

Others on the list included a $122 million romantic comedy.

Of course, there's plenty of low budget failure. People spend $25 thousand making a movie which ends up being shown at a few film festivals and then disappears having been seen by no more that a hundred people.

Another double feature idea

With home video, you can make your own double features. The trick is to find two movies that will complement one another, which have similar themes but approach them in different ways. I've suggested other double features over the years. Here's one more:

Woody Allen's Match Point --a working class Irish tennis pro marries into a wealthy British family.

and

The Sweet Pie and Pie, (1941) Three Stooges short where three heiresses marry the Stooges while they (the Stooges) are in prison awaiting imminent execution. The heiresses have to marry in order to collect their inheritance. But moments after the wedding and before the execution, news arrives that the real killers confessed and the boys are pardoned, released and go home with their horrified brides.

Russell Johnson, Dave Madden, RIP

Russell Johnson--Professor Roy Hinkley from Gilligan's Island--has died at age 89. He was a bombardier on a B-24 during World War Two, shot down and injured in the Philippines on one mission. The main things I remember seeing him in, beside Gilligan's Island, were the movie MacArthur, an episode of The FBI where he played a son of a wealthy patriarch taking charge when a family member is kidnapped, and there were the old science fiction movies, This Island Earth and Attack of the Crab Monsters. He sacrifices himself to save the others in those movies.

But he has a long list of credits. I missed him in an uncredited appearance in Three Days of the Condor.

And Dave Madden has died at age 82. Perhaps best known as Ruben Kincaid on The Partridge Family. He was regarded as the nicest actor in Hollywood. According to the made-for-TV movie about the making of the Partridge Family, Madden became close with Danny Bonaduce, taking him home on weekends as the cast tried to protect him from his abusive father. He appeared on Laugh-In, was a regular on Alice, I remember seeing him on Married with Children.

Madden couldn't stand Marty Ingels, Shirley Jones' husband. Oddly, this keeps turning up in biographies of him for some reason. Ingels probably is a bit intense.

Woody Allen's Match Point

Covered much the same territory as Crimes and Misdemeanors and Cassandra's Dream but was probably better than either. 

Allen couldn't afford music for Match Point. He wound up making a deal with a British record company that put out a CD of public domain recordings of classical music. The music clearly came from old records.

Match Point is about a working class Irish tennis pro who marries into an upper-class English family. Maybe it should have been about a working-class Brit who marries into an upper-class Irish family. I'm not sure how I feel about movies vilifying members of the lower classes who find themselves among the upper crust but it seems to be a common theme. There was a brief spate of made-for-TV movies, The Billionaire Boys Club and The Preppie Murder, both about young men from working class families who got into exclusive private schools on academic scholarships and ended up in prison.

Okay, just one last Ronan Farrow thing

From The Advocate:

I believe Ronan sincerely wants any conversation involving him to focus more on his interests in policy, equality, and justice, and less on his celebrity. But it gets hard to reconcile that belief with the tweet bomb he dropped during the Golden Globes. “Missed the Woody Allen tribute — did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?” Cue the mushroom cloud.

Ronan was referring to ’90s accusations by Allen's daughter, Ronan's sister, that the director molested her. I feel for anyone who's endured the trials the Farrow family has, but to discuss a subject like that in such a public forum and yet remain conspicuously silent on whether or not you're gay gives me bad pre-2012 Anderson Cooper flashbacks. Ronan doesn't need to fly a banner over Times Square or turn his MSNBC show into the last season of Ellen, he just need not shrink from it (I, in my Advocate capacity, unsuccessfully reached out to Ronan a few times via Twitter).

On a vaguely related note, I would say that the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow fiasco is a point in favor of same-sex marriage. Look at those two. They weren't married, they lived across Central Park from one another, but they still somehow regarded themselves as a family, Woody Allen even declaring himself the father of some of the adopted children even though he knew pretty much nothing about them. Mia was sleeping with her ex-husband, Woody was believed to have been sleeping with Mia's sister, but who knows.  He was her boyfriend. Her elderly New York millionaire boyfriend. The kids should have called him "Uncle Woody", not "Daddy".

How much of this stuff would have happened if they had been legally married? If any of it did, we could at least condemn them unequivocally.