I'm pro-silent student film

I've watched student films and they're mostly awful. The better ones are silent, and the silent movies now tend to have voice-over narration rather than intertitles. I believe in a combination. When they rereleased the silent film Metropolis, color tinted with a rock soundtrack, it had a mix of subtitles and intertitles. Then there was Mike Kuchar's SIns of the Fleshapoids which had comic book-like dialog balloons along with voice-over narration. Guy Madden's first movie, "The Dead Father", was a voice-over with one scene where we hear one character say a line. He coughs and we hear it as if it were recorded on a record.

There was a Japanese silent film I saw made probably in the '80s in the style of an old silent movie. It had intertitles in Japanese that required subtitles in English, and it had the machines speak, like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. The heroes are hired to deliver a ransom---the people who hire them come in with a tape recorder---they turn it on and we hear a voice explain the job. Later, we hear the villain speak to them through a loud speaker.

There was Robert Rodriguez's student film "Bedhead". It won awards in film festivals across the country. THAT was his ticket to Hollywood, not El Mariachi. When he met with studio executives, they asked him if he had any ideas for a feature film he wanted to make. He said maybe a real version of the movie he just made. He showed them El Mariachi and they thought it was good enough to release theatrically.

A silent movies tend to require music. I've heard it argued that there are no public domain sound recordings in the United States while others think recordings made before 1970 are public domain, at least if the composition isn't copyrighted. There's Soviet music. The USSR wasn't part of the international copyright convention. Ethiopian music. I don't know.

There used to be a website attacking bad student films, listing student film cliches, such as slow-talking actors, smoking cigarettes to show how upset they are, and various artistic touches. There was an angry comment on the site from a film student who had maxed out his credit cards making a short silent film for $40,000. He correctly recognized that dialog was where student films fell flat. His film was about a girl preparing to leave home and it apparently had no soundtrack at all. He submitted it to film festivals and was infuriated when they would send it back with a note saying it had no sound. 

That was in the days before digital video. He apparently shot on 16mm. But----forty thousand dollars? For a movie about a girl preparing to leave home? For forty thousand dollars he couldn't add music? Back then you could buy four new cars for that. 

Then there were comments from film students who thought it would be HILARIOUS to make a student film using every one of the student film chiches listed. And, last time I looked for student films on YouTube, half of them seemed to be student films that were spoofs of bad student films. That became a genre itself, and not a very good one.

But---poor film students. They spend four years studying FEATURE films, then, for their final project, they get to make a SHORT film. They're two very different things. You don't even need a good idea to make a feature film. If you have an original idea, you're trying too hard. A short film requires far more thought if it's going to be any good.

Dennis Miller's podcast cruelly panned

I watched Dennis Miller's old latenight talk show. Here's the only joke I remember: "The French think Dan Quayle is a genius."

That was so long ago. When he expressed admiration for Ross Perot, I realized that he was basically apolitical.

Perot's supporters were people who didn't know there were political differences. They thought everyone wanted the same thing and that politcal debates were "bickering". "Why don't they stop bickering and do what everybody wants!"

Now Miller's just not a very convincing right-winger. And like some other right-wing converts, his verbal skills have gotten very bad. Long ago, I found his references easy to understand. They all seemed pretty straight-forward. On NPR, they interviewed some guy who wrote a blog researching and explaining his references, and he explained a few that seemed perfectly obvious to me. But now Miller's just blathering.

So, anyway, I haven't heard it, but here's a review of Dennis Miller's podcast.

Miller is 64 now. Reduced to podcasting, no offense to podcasters or their admirers. 

Sylvester Stallone's net worth

According to the article, Stallone made most of his money

from his movies such as The Party at Kitty and Stud's.

You know what Sylvester Stallone's net worth is? It's $400 million according to this.

That's an outrage.

He appeared in Woody Allen's Bananas, by the way. 

Romanian director's homage to Woody Allen

Variety reports that Romanian director Paul Negoescu made his new film, Summer Lover, as a homage to Woody Allen.

The eponymous anti-hero of “Summer Lover” is the philandering Petru, an adjunct math professor who splits moral hairs with mathematical precision when he justifies bedding co-eds half his age. (They’re not his students, he insists.) Content to continue reaping the benefits of an open relationship, his endless summer comes to a jarring end when his girlfriend suddenly announces she’s pregnant...

Though Negoescu’s original screenplay mined that unexpected pregnancy for all its dramatic worth, script doctor Jacques Akchoti steered him toward comedy instead, during workshops at the Jerusalem-based Sam Spiegel Intl. Film Lab. Studying the filmography of Woody Allen, Negoescu soon found himself channeling the neurotic protagonists of the director’s early works, casting Alexandru Papadopol – star and co-producer of “Lottery” – as Petru, a “hypochondriac, paranoiac [who’s] questioning everything around him. 

“I never thought I could make a film in [Allen’s] style,” Negoescu says, although he’d always admired the director’s movies. “[‘Summer Lover’] is not only inspired by Woody Allen’s films, but it’s an homage to him.”

Read it here: https://variety.com/2018/film/global/paul-negoescu-summer-lover-1202828820/#article-comments

How long do most movie careers last?

I was listening to the Thought Spiral podcast. Comedian Andy Kindler talked about his early attempts at being a singer songwriter. He seemed hurt that no one supported him in that endeavor. Josh "Elvis" Weinstein pointed out that Kindler has had a thirty-year career in comedy, something that rarely happens in popular music.

With movies, I've noticed, looking at imdb.com, how many people have one or two credits and go for years between jobs---people who made one movie in the '60s, one in the '70s, and that was it. Each is a major achievement no matter how inconsequential it seemed to everybody else.

Then there are the successful ones. I'm mainly interested in the extreme low end of cinema, like Ray Dennis Steckler who worked various jobs--he was a janitor at one point and was manager of a furniture store as I recall. Herschell Gordon Lewis quit film and went into direct marketing. Dean Stockwell was and still is a successful actor and has been since childhood, but I read that he gave up and became a realtor when was called back to star in Quantum Leap.

The sad cases are people like Ed Wood, Jr, who should have given up on movies but didn't.

Alfred Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut about the time he ran into his old boss, the guy who gave him his first job in the British movie industry, working as a location scout. They pretended not to know each other.

I've thought about all the film students going into debt to get a degree in film. Most want to be movie directors, but how many people in their 20's direct movies? They'll be forty before anyone trusts them with the amount of money that goes into a movie, but I didn't really think about the other end of it----it'll take decades to build a career if you can do it at all, then you'll find yourself washed up in seven or eight years.

That's not really true, of course. There are TV commercials, industrial films, TV shows. Do they still make After School Specials? But you don't have to go to USC to do that stuff.

But what do I know.

Andy Kindler just landed a big movie role, by the way.

North Korea

I saw a clip on YouTube of a North Korean martial arts movie. It seemed pretty good. I know next to nothing about North Korean viewing habits, but it's been reported that bootleg videotapes of South Korean soap operas are popular there. That was a few years ago. They may have switched to DVD by now.

This came up again when that pro-assassination "comedy" made by sex-offender James Franco and blood-thirsty Zionist Seth Rogen was made. The US government wanted the movie produced so copies of it would find their way into North Korea.

If you look at the RT website you may be able to find a documentary about North Korea that had some focus on their movie industry. The documentary followed North Korean rules----for example, any images of North Koran leader has to be shown in full---it couldn't be at the edge of the frame only half-visible. This meant that they couldn't pan away from a picture of him. If there was picture of the guy in the background of a shot, they couldn't pan past it.

I saw on one news report that children in North Korean schools were reading To Kill a Mockingbird. They're not Marxist-Leninist, by the way. The works of Marx and Lenin have been banned there for years. As I understand it, their national ideology is a mix of Korean mysticism and Confucianism. Mao Tse Tung denounced Confucianism as reactionary.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the North Koreans using old Lincoln limousines at Kim Il Jong's funeral. The North Korean auto industry exports cars, mostly to Vietnam, but it doesn't sound like they produce anything interesting or retro. If the US were to start importing North Korean cars, I'm sure I would be disappointed.

DA considering charges against Sylvester Stallone

He doesn't SEEM guilty, but he's an awfully good actor.

The LA County DA's office is reviewing a sex crime case referred to them by Santa Monica police against well-known pornographic film actor Sylvester Stallone. Stallone is perhaps best known for his starring role in 1970's The Party at Kitty and Stud's. He played Stud.

They won't say what the case is about, but Stallone was accused late last year of raping a woman in the 1990s. The victim filed a report even though it was way past California's 10-year statute of limitations.

We'll see how it goes.