Mosby's Marauders (Disney, 1967)

Kurt Russell was fifteen or sixteen. He plays a cute Confederate child soldier ordered to man a remote outpost on a river along with another kid. A sergeant and lieutenant have come to check on them. The sergeant browbeats Russell while the lieutenant has taken a liking to him. Before they ride away, the man gazes at him and says he'll come back to see him later. When he's alone.

Russell and the other child soldier wrestle over a gun when the lieutenant suddenly re-appears. They accidentally shoot him. Knowing they'll be executed, the other kid runs away. Russell crosses the river and joins some Union soldiers he befriended. They take him as a prisoner but he's freed by and joins a gang of traitorous Confederate marauders.

The children in this thing fight in a war, face execution for desertion and for shooting an officer who it sounded like was coming for some immoral purpose, and the kids love smoking. And this was made for The Wonderful World of Disney. 

With James MacArthur and Peggy Lipton. All white cast. Free on Movieland Tv.

I thought Disney was the only studio in Hollywood that was on the United States' side in the Civil War, but I guess I was wrong. As I understand it, during the silent era, Hollywood found that every time they made a pro-Union movie, they'd get angry letters from backward Southerners who were convinced that the South won the war.

You know, on The Beverly Hillbillies, how no one could convince Granny that the North won the war? That was apparently a real thing.

Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1973)

I saw this at the university when I was in high school and thought the opening titles were a little sedate for a Hitchcock movie. It was a long helicopter shot of London, a little like the opening shot of the model town in The Lady Vanishes. 

Hitchcock's second-to-last film. After a period of decline in the '60's, this was his vindication. Hitchcock for the '70's, a murder movie with a man falsely accused, circumstances conspiring to make him look really, really guilty. There were no obvious process shots. And there was nudity, although, horribly, it was mostly women who were dead or being murdered.

 

As he told Truffaut, his cameos in his movies had become a burden. Hitchcock had to get it out of the way quickly so the audience would quit looking for him and just watch the movie. He's easy to spot in the opening crowd scene. 

 

There's a necktie killer loose in London. As in his other movies, there are no unnecessary scenes. Everything contributes to the plot. And it gets moving very quickly.

Jason Mann four years ago

Look for him at the 29 second mark.

I caught a glimpse of Jason Mann in a trailer for a movie called Aleksi (2018), filmed in what used to be Yugoslavia. His hair was slightly longer. He spoke only English. He plays a guy named Christian. I don't know how he happened to be in it.

He was director of photography on a movie, All Against All, made in Slovenia. He also acted in a movie made in New York, so he hasn't abandoned America completely.

I have mixed feelings about the poor wretch. I don't blame him for the failure of the movie he made for Project Greenlight. It looked horrifying, them racing to finish the script so they could start filming. How could it be any good? They could have at least brought in a comedy writer.

I've said this before. He cited Pasolini and Bunuel as his influences, but they were both Communists. They had definite points of view. Mann went out of his way to avoid saying whether the senator in his movie was a Republican or a Democrat. It was an apolitical film about a politician.

But I don't know what other movies had to say that was so brilliant.

They kept talking about the great opportunity of being handed three million bucks to make a movie, but it was a made-for-TV movie. He had to meet HBO's specifications.

For three million dollars, you can make a huge, epic, truly independent film or you can make a middling made-for-TV movie. HBO demanded the latter.

I don't think Mann has taken full advantage of being America's most recognized-yet-reviled director. It's not what he hoped for, but nobody gets to pick their career.

He was in another film, American Thief, playing a cyber security guy, available for two bucks on Amazon Prime.

Zelensky's kind of a jerk

Hungary has finally pointed out the obvious. That the Zelensky regime is really ungrateful. 

“I can’t recall when a leader of a country in need of help would dare to speak out against anyone in a fashion like President Zelensky did, not only against Hungary, but even against the German Chancellor,”  Speaker of the Hungarian parliament Lazlo Kover said in a TV interview.

Zelensky's been barking orders at Germany and everyone else.

“[The] German government cynically refuses to supply us even with old Leopard-1 tanks and Marder IFVs,” [Ukrainian ambassador] Melnik stated in a social media post, branding such behavior a “disgrace that would go down in history.”

Melnik later attacked the German chancellor for acting like "an offended liverwurst", which is probably a grave insult there.

Meanwhile, Der Spiegel reports that Germany won't send tanks to Ukraine because they don't trust Zelensky. For "historical reasons", they can't have German tanks rolling into Russia, and they don't trust the Zelensky regime to not try sending them. Ukraine has gotten tanks only from Poland and the Czech Republic, none from the US, UK or Germany.

All this might explain Sean Penn's affinity for Zelensky.

Penn has kind of shut up about Ukraine. He said he considered joining the Azov battalion, which would have been a real help to them, a 61-year-old movie star. Has he ever even been in a war movie? Good thing he didn't join, though, since he lost interest so quickly.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

I remember seeing this in a drive-in theater. It must have been 1969, so I was six. The only thing I remember is the scene of the girls threatening to murder another girl as they hang her over a railing. I slept through the rest of it in the back of the old Volkswagen bus. My brother, who might have been ten, saw the nude scene.

Maggie Smith plays an eccentric Fascist schoolteacher in Scotland in the 1930's who is, not surprisingly, an unwholesome influence on her students.

It actually made British (albeit Scottish) schools look a lot better than they do in most movies. There was only one scene of potentially fatal bullying mentioned above, there was no punishment of any kind. Of course it was a girl's school. The only thing that was worse than in other movies was Miss Brodie manipulating students to sleep with a male teacher.

The teachers who see themselves as college graduates with a pretty good job are fine. It's the art teacher who sees himself as a painter and Miss Brodie who sees herself as---something---who are a danger to the kids.

Johnny Depp was already in serious decline

"Now that the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial is over, it’s time to get a grip on reality."

Amanda Heard didn't do it. Johnny Depp's sad decline started before she did anything.

From Roger Friedman's Showbiz411:

Maybe you’ve forgotten “The Lone Ranger,” a spectacular failure in which he played Tonto. How about “Mortdecai”? Or “Black Mass”? Surely you remember “Transcendence”? ($23 million total). Or “Richard Says Goodbye”? ($325K– not sure it was ever released.)

Even “Alice Through the Looking Glass” was a bust in this country– $77 million, although it did well abroad where English comprehension wasn’t an issue. Then there’s “London Fields,” the movie that brought him together with Heard. When it was finally released after many swipes at re-cutting, the film was seen by no one.

Depp has had four flops just since 2019 including the most recent, “Minimata,” which made $610K abroad, has no domestic box office. The others were worse.

As for the “Pirates” movies, they declined in box office successively over the years. The last one, in 2017, was a big hit internationally but made $172 million here....

He's too old. 58. James Stewart was ten years younger than Depp is now when Hitchcock blamed his aging appearance for the failure of Vertigo.

Art Carney and Lilly Tomlin at the same age Johnny Depp and Amanda Heard are now. (This is true.)

Depp wins

I’m still neutral, or at least indifferent. I don’t know why the jury believed the version of events from someone who was drunk or high when they happened. I don’t think Johnny Depp has been vindicated considering the things other celebrities have gotten away with when everyone knew they were guilty. Didn’t he already lose a libel suit in England? His conduct as an actor seemed to be the main thing wrecking his career. He doesn't bother learning his lines anymore.

I hoped he would end up like fellow spendthrift Nicolas Cage, taking every role he could to pay his debts, but Cage wasn’t a drunk or a horrible person.