Natalie Portman snubs women directors

Well. The Oscars are over. I haven't seen a thing but I should watch this South Korean film, Parasite.

Natalie Portman wore a dress with the names of all the women directors who had been "snubbed" for Oscars. This seems extremely cruel. How did she decide which women to put on her dress? Because if you were a woman and you directed a pretty good movie which didn't get nominated, it'd be quite a slap in the face---a SECOND Oscar snub---to be left off the dress.

Principal forced to resign for being anti-teenage-rape

Is the crap I write really that objectionable?

A high school principal in Camas, Washington, was put on administrative leave for posting on Facebook that the death of wealthy Los Angeles rapist Kobe Bryant was "karma." She deleted the comment and apologized for some reason, but she was still suspended from her job for thinking that rapists are bad. She has since resigned.

Pro-rape basketball fans threatened her. Students at the school threatened to walk out but they didn't report why. Bryant raped a teenage girl. You'd think high school students would have sided with her against a middle-aged rapist millionaire.

I said pretty much the same thing she did on this blog. I didn't say anything about "karma" because, strictly speaking, karma is the belief that that girl deserved to be raped because of something she did in a past life.

Bryant raped a teenager. He was strangling her the whole time he was doing it. There was no misunderstanding as he later claimed. He got away with it because sports reporters and moronic basketball fans spent months trashing his victim.

To hell with that guy.

Orson Bean, Kirk Douglas, RIP

Orson Bean was struck by a car and killed at age 91. He must have been very healthy. He was still working.

He had been blacklisted in the '50's. His father was a founder of the ACLU and had raised money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. He had started out as a magician and went into stand-up, adopting the name Bean because it got a laugh from the audience. Which would have been terribly cruel if it had been his real name.

I knew who he was in the 1970's, but knew nothing about him. He was a celebrity, I saw him on talk shows and now I see he was a panelist on What's My Line. I could have recognized him and I knew his personality. But I never knew what he famous for. Was he an actor, a comedian? An intellectual?



Kirk Douglas, who broke the blacklist with the movie Spartacus, appropriately enough, passed away at 103.

He said he picked roles for the quality of the material, not because he thought the movie would be successful. A good strategy if you can do it. Kubrick's Paths of Glory didn't make a lot of money at the time. Years later, Douglas appeared in an episode of Tales From the Crypt, again as a World War One French Army officer. He gets his son executed for cowardice but thinks of a way to make him act bravely in front of the firing squad.

Don't walk through traffic staring at a smart phone

I found out what happened a couple of weeks later.

I was driving my mother home. We were on a four-lane divided boulevard with a bus stop in the island in the middle. There were police cars, fire trucks and ambulances blocking the street. It was night so we couldn't see what happened which was just as well. But I could guess what it was.

My mother heard from someone at the senior center. A young woman got off the bus and set off across the street staring at her smartphone. I don't know who was at fault in the accident. It might not have helped her if she'd been aware of her surroundings but it couldn't have hurt.

I live in the university area and it's amazing how students wander through traffic staring at these things.

At least they might be reading something useful or at least interesting.

In my day, college students were all riding bikes. They had ten-speeds that they could ride without their hands on the handlebars. They would sit back pedaling, often with their hands in their pockets so they couldn't brake if they had to, and they would ride through stop signs and red lights without slowing down or even looking.

Then there were the joggers. There are jogging trails now, but back then they'd run on the sidewalks and run through intersections without looking.

The author of a pro-jogging book appeared on a local radio talk show. Someone called in and asked about this. It seemed incredibly stupid. He explained that when you're running you have a lot of endorphins and you don't even think about that.

"Well don't you think you SHOULD?" the host asked.

And he repeated that when you're running you have a lot of endorphins and you don't even think about that. Like that was a perfectly reasonable.

Midsommar

So I watched Midsommar last night, a US-Swedish co-production filmed in Hungary.

To be honest, I fast forwarded through some of it and didn't pay very close attention to what I did watch. I saw warnings that the movie had a lot of sex and nudity, but I must have missed most of it. Did see some gore.

Americans go to Sweden to attend a festival that takes place every 90 years. It turns out to be a pagan thing. And paganism turns out to be a terrible religion.

It was like Poltergeist, or Shadows & Fog, or Plan 9 From Outer Space. It might have been terrifying if you were there, but it disappointed horror fans.

It's the opposite of the Exorcist. That movie was based loosely on a real case---a fourteen-year-old boy was supposedly possessed. Several years ago, a reporter tracked down the people involved. According to the kid's friends, he wasn't possessed, he was just a jerk. The reporter talked to the last surviving priest who took part in the exorcism who said he saw nothing scary about any of it. The kid sort of spoke Latin, but the priests thought he was making fun of them. Another priest wrote an account of the case at the time and said he laughed while some of the stuff was happening. The Exorcist was scary but you'd have laughed if you'd been there.

I saw horror fans complain about Midsommar not working as a horror movie, but it may have been like Dark Crimes (2016) which I took to be a morbid true crime art house film. Critics hated it because they were expecting a thriller.

With Bjorn Andreson in a supporting role. He's in his 70's. As far as I know, it's the only movie I've seen him in since since he played the teen love object in Death in Venice.

Success from failure

How many years ago was this? Over thirty years. I was at work. I was talking to a guy there who told me he was a film major in college. I asked him what kind of work he wanted to do. He said, "I'm going to go to Hollywood and direct movies."

I was stunned at his confidence. I tried to talk to him about low budget regional film and got a blank stare. Later, I asked if he was working on anything and he said that the university here wasn't production-oriented.

If he had focused more on the directing than on Hollywood he might have had more to show for it. On the other hand, that was in the years before digital video and he might have just squandered tens of thousands of dollars making a movie with no commercial value.

That was before the big film school boom. The economy was somewhat better and there were fields you could go into and make money. Not like now. I read a few years ago that bartending and waiting tables were the only areas with real job growth. You may as well go to film school. You won't be missing out on the economic boom.

Last time I checked, the guy was a news photographer in a town up the highway from here.

Now, if he made a movie there, he'd be the only one. It would be the town's only chance to see itself portrayed in cinema, although moving pictures aren't the novelty they once were.

I always thought, make a movie using as many high school kids as possible. In a small town, I would imagine that the kids would have an average of five family members--parents and grandparents--who would be obliged to see their movie. Of course, if you didn't pay anyone to be in your movie, you'd have to at least give the kids free tickets to let their families see it, and I think you'd have to give them a few DVD's.

Just try to bring in as much money as a high school play without it costing nearly as much.

We have a picture somewhere of my older brother at age five wearing a cowboy suit and sitting on a small horse. It was a photo taken in a different era----an era when strangers could walk into a neighborhood with a cowboy suit and a horse and take pictures of kids without their parents' knowledge or consent then get the parents to pay five dollars for a copy of the picture.

Making a movie using that business model, it would just be a really, really specialized niche audience. Just people who live in a particular town and are related to one of the people in the movie.

Someone in Portland, Oregon, got the same idea I had years ago. They filmed a zero budget movie about a video store employee. After he's fired, he goes from video store to video store applying for jobs. Every video store where they filmed a scene would HAVE to stock the movie!

Now, more recently, I read about a guy in England. He was in a big city. He hired local hooligans to appear in an extreme low budget action film. He sold the DVD's in local stores. They sold for five pounds each, cheap enough that people could buy them on impulse. And he made pretty good money, I think they said twenty or thirty thousand pounds.

In a small town, just film scenes anywhere that DVD's might reasonably be sold. Although you could glut the market pretty quickly.

Okay, I just googled the town where that guy lives. 53,000 people----it's a lot bigger than I thought.

It's like an old commercial they used to have for Alcoholics Anonymous. It noted the irony that people who drink out of loneliness have vast opportunities for friendship in AA.

For that guy I knew, living in a small city could be his best hope for success as a director.

Annie Oakley

I watched a couple more episodes of Annie Oakley, a 1950's children's western. It's public domain and available on YouTube or on a number of streaming video channels.

It was shockingly violent.

In one episode, a little girl watched her father being murdered by two men, then the horses pulling the wagon she's in panic and run until the wagon rolls over. She's blinded in the accident. Then the killers come to kill her because they think she can identify them,

In another episode, Alan Hale, Jr, who had long wavy hair, kidnaps and clearly intends to murder Annie'a little brother, Tagg.

It would have been a pretty good show except that Annie Oakley, the star of the show and expert marksman, never shoots anyone. She'll shoot guns out of their hands, she'll shoot light fixtures so they'll drop on people's heads, she'll shoot the dirt in front of them so they'll get some in their eyes, but she won't simply shoot them even when they're trying to kill her or her brother.

There was less extreme but completely gratuitous violence. A cowboy becomes enraged at Tagg for spilling lemonade on him. He berates him and threatens to spank him, so the sheriff step in and the two grown men start fighting. And this had nothing to do with the plot and didn't even affect the subplot.

In another, the kid is sitting in a wash tub. The soap slips out of his hand and slides across the floor. Annie Oakley picks it up and throws it at him and hits him in the face.