Eating Raoul, 1982

Has it been that long? I don't know why it surprises me. I just watched Eating Raoul for the first time in 37 or 38 years. I saw it the same way I did the first time I watched it, on home video.

The film is about a couple whose apartment is full of furniture from the 1950's. They drive a battered car from the '50's. The movie is now older than the 1950's stuff was when the movie was made.

Paul Bartel and Mary Waronov star as Paul and Mary Bland. They're trying to raise money to open a restaurant and are annoyed by all the swingers who live in their apartment building. Paul accidentally kills a drunken swinger who invades their apartment and attacks his wife, they discover he has several hundred dollars in his wallet, and they begin raising money for their restaurant by luring swingers into the home and killing them.

Raoul (Robert Beltran) is a burglar who discovers their crimes and wants in on it.

It must have been pre-AIDS.

The thing I noticed about it that I somehow didn't notice back then was that much of it was filmed with hand held cameras. You don't notice it until the camera "dollies" in or out during a scene.

Paul Bartel was known, at to least to me, mainly for directing Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 which in some ways had the same flavor as this movie.

Poor Paul Bartel died at age 61 in 2000. I remember seeing him in a number of things back then and looking at IMDb, I see he had far more thriving career than I realized.

With Ed Begley, Jr, and Buck Henry.

The Spikes Gang, 1974

An American western filmed in Spain. With a small but all-American cast. It was no spaghetti western. Directed by Rickard Fleischer. With Ron Howard and Charles Martin Smith, both from American Graffiti, and Gary Grimes from Summer of '42 as naive country boys who become enamored with aging outlaw Lee Marvin who they find wounded and dying and nurse back to health.

The young fellows run away from home to become criminals, I guess. It might have been better had they been naturally bloodthirsty with a depraved indifference to human life. Someone noted somewhere that peasant revolts tend to be especially bloody. You'd think farm boys would be more brutal, shocking even hardened middle-age criminals.

But, of course, they were nice boys out playing outlaw even though they were each about twenty-years-old. Ron Howard agreed to star in Happy Days to stay out of Vietnam. They wouldn't draft you if you were on TV. Others in their age group killed millions, but they played innocent naifs in this thing.

Available on Amazon Prime.

A much better movie was Bad Company about some young fellows who set out to become criminals, one of them only wanting to dodge the draft during the Civil War.

The Bigamist, directed by Ida Lupino, 1952

Edmund O'Brien turning on the charm.

They put some thought into it. You can see how the guy ended up as a bigamist.

You know how, on sit-coms, when a couple is trying to adopt, they try to really suck up to the person from the adoption agency? Edmund O'Brien was sort of the opposite in this. He and his wife, Joan Fontaine, go to an adoption agency. He's a bit surly. He's hesitates slightly when asked to sign the form allowing them to investigate every aspect of their personal lives, but he does it. The investigator, Edmund Gwenn, finds him living in an apartment in Los Angeles with his other wife and baby.

This happens early on and it says right in the opening credits, "Edmund O'Brien as THE BIGAMIST" so I'm not giving too much away.

The story is told in flashback. Even the adoption agency guy is understanding.

He's a traveling salesman. He's away from home five days a week and he gets lonely. Out of boredom, he takes a ride on a tour bus to see the homes of the Hollywood stars. He tries to talk to a Ida Lupino, but she's just as surly as he is. They begin dating. He tries to end it and he doesn't see her for a few weeks, but when he sees her again, she's having some terrible health problem and he impulsively proposes. Then he finds that his first wife's father just died, so he couldn't very well divorce her then. And his fiance was sick so he couldn't upset her. 

It's a little slow like movies of that era tend to be. Even if he weren't a bigamist, Edmund O'Brien doesn't seem like someone who should adopt, although he was helping out a lot with his baby in his second marriage.

Caravaggio, Derek Jarman, 1986

I saw this thing in a local art house in 1986. The theater was packed. I had read something about it but didn't know what to expect and didn't quite understand it. I liked some of the anachronisms, the ones that seemed natural. Like a guy with a cigarette in his mouth working on an old motorcycle in one scene or a guy typing on a 1916 Royal typewriter which looked like something that might have existed back them.

Watching it now, the buzzcuts and the '80's hairstyles bother me more than anything else. There's a scene early of Caravaggio as a teen. An aging client chases him around the room with his pants around his ankles. The young fellow tells the man that he's an art object and that the man's gotten his money's worth. Later, he's taken in by a cardinal who apparently molests him and bankrolls him as an artist. Didn't explain where he learned to paint.

The sets were minimal, a few pieces of rustic furniture in rooms that were otherwise empty. Everything was nicely lit. Looked like the 16th century to me.

Emotionally lifeless. The only feeling I had for the characters was that I'd never want to be around any of them. But what more should I want?

Tilda Swinton does yoga. With Robbie Coltraine, Sean Bean,

Available on Fandor.

The Sheltering Sky, 1990

A wealthy couple and one of their rich friends travel to North Africa. They say they're travelers, not tourists, but they're oblivious to the dangers. They're roughing it, traveling by bus or train and hitching a ride with a young man and his domineering mother. That guy and his mother---he keeps begging for money because his mother won't give him any---really seem more on the ball than the three Americans. At least they have their own transportation.

A love triangle forms. Then thing go really, really bad. I won't give it away, but it shows the importance of not going anywhere you can't get an ambulance.

Some amazing scenery. I can see why they wanted to go. You had to go there yourself back then. You couldn't see it in the movies.

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. I don't know if he used any of the same locations Pasolini did in Oedipus Rex. Like Pasolini's movie, it has a pandemic tie-in.

Based on the 1949 novel by Paul Bowles who appears in the movie as a narrator.

Debra Winger and John Malkovich, Campbell Scott. With Jill Bennett and Timothy Spall.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Adoration, Canada, 2008

I was sleep deprived to begin with then I was watching this in the middle of the night.

A young fellow whose parents died in a car wreck claims in his high school French class that his Palestinian father tried to use his pregnant wife to smuggle a bomb on board an Israeli airliner.

A Muslim woman stops and speaks to the teen and his uncle as they put up a nativity scene in their front yard. She mentions that Muslims consider Jesus a prophet.

"Don't the Jews ALSO consider Jesus a prophet?" the kid says.

No. They don't. It's not a point against them, so it just sounds stupid to say they do.

And since she considers Jesus a prophet, a burka-clad Muslim woman shouldn't take kindly to a graven image of him.

Movie with a lot of characters who openly hate Palestinians and love Zionists. The only guy in the movie with any sympathy for Palestinians is a Nazi on the internet.

Directed by Atom Egoyan, a Canadian-Egyptian-Armenian. The Israeli government claims that the Armenian genocide was a hoax and Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews are known for spitting on Armenian priests. The guy ought to show some self-respect.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

How to Beat the High Cost of Living, 1980

I never really watched this thing. It was filmed here in Eugene, Oregon, some of it just down the street from me. Maybe seeing my own city in a movie wasn't that big a thrill when I could step outside and see the real thing, but now, 40 years later, it's fun to watch. The only movie shot in Eugene that was also set in Eugene.

When Fred Willard passed away, I wrote about the time I saw him sitting in an RV in the Taco Time parking lot. I thought he must have filmed a scene earlier at the Texaco station, but it turned out he had a scene at Taco Time that must have been filmed that evening. He sits at an outside table talking with Susan St James.

There was a scene at the Texaco across the street also filmed at night. In the background, you could see the Taco Time and a Baskin Robbins.

This was around the time that Baskin Robbins was robbed at gunpoint by a man who went on to become the I-5 Killer. I was in a class in school with the girl who worked there the night of the robbery. She didn't seem shaken by it. She told the teacher about it that morning, said something to the effect that the robber seemed like a jackass. The teacher was angry that they would have a teenage girl working alone at night, and she was right about that.

In a reverse shot, I think you can see the motel where the I-5 Killer was living.

Starring Jane Curtain, Jessica Lange and Susan St. James, with Eddie Albert, Dabney Coleman, Richard Benjamin, Art Metrano, Sybil Danning, Ronnie Schell, Cathryn Damon and Garrett Morris.

A guy I once knew slightly was listed in the closing credits. He never mentioned it. He told me he was an ordained Unitarian minister but didn't mention being in a movie.

They use payphones. In one scene, Jane Curtain's electricity has been shut off, but she's still able to use her telephone. Both these things would be impossible today.

I don't know if the plot made any sense. There was a big ball full of money in the shopping center and if you guessed how much money was in it, you'd win a prize. Three financially strapped petit bourgeois women set out to rob it.  Sort of a poor man's Fun with Dick and Jane (1977).

They keep talking about how terrible the economy is. Things actually looked pretty good back then. In the scenes in the shopping center, half the stores aren't belly up like they are now.