Brigham Young University's "Johnny Lingo"

This happened in the 1980's or 1990's. The South Lane School District hired a Mormon as superintendent. The guy brought in a movie produced by Brigham Young "University" called "Johnny Lingo" he wanted all the kids to see. Set in some Polynesia-like island society where men buy their wives by trading cattle for women. The women take pride in being a "four cow wife"---that their husbands paid that many cows for them.

But there's a homely girl named Mahana who nobody likes. Her father wouldn't get very many cows for her! But Johnny Lingo comes to the village and wants to buy her. 

"I am Mahana's father. What is it you want?"

"I wish to take Mahana for my wife," says Johnny Lingo.

"It is hard for a man to give his daughter to another."

"I am prepared to pay. How many cow do you wish for Mahana?"

"Three cows!" he says. Everyone laughs. Who would trade so many cows for Mahana!

Johnny Lingo holds up his hand to shut them up.

"Three cows is many. But not enough for Mahana. I will pay----EIGHT COWS!"

The natives are shocked. Why, it must be a joke.

He brings the cows. And he brings Mahana a mirror as a wedding present. She is now beautiful because Johnny Lingo paid eight cows. Self-esteem made her good-looking.

This, according to the title, is "Building self-worth in others". 

My mother was the counselor in the grade school. She objected to the movie on a number of grounds, that it ends with Mahana feeling superior, not just equal to others and feeling that way only because some asshole overpaid for her.

The Mormon superintendent turned white with rage whenever anyone disagreed with him about anything. My mother's job was soon eliminated. She moved to teaching at the middle school. There, a boy said that he little sister was being abused by their Mormon stepfather. Their mother had died and they were living with an unrelated man.

My mother reported this to the principal. His sister had bruises from beatings.

"Only on the bottom!" said the woman principal, like that meant it was fine.

My mother mentioned this to the Mormon vice principal. He had only been a teacher for a year or two before the Mormon superintendent promoted him.

"We're going to let the church handle it," he said.

The church didn't "handle it".

At the end of one school day, the boy wasn't leaving. He was afraid to go home. My mother took him to the office. Instead of calling CPS, the principal let the kid look up the phone number and call them himself. My mother walked in as the kid was on the phone, not knowing what to say, so my mother took the phone and made the report.

The principal came out of her office was a aghast. 

"I don't want you to be held responsible," she said.

They drove my mother out of her job within the year. I don't think she ever had any feelings one way or the other about the Mormons before then, but she did after that.

Involuntary (Sweden, 2008) Ruben Ostlund director

Filmed static camera in long takes. The movie intercuts between unrelated stories. 

A bus driver stops at a roadside restaurant for the passengers to eat then refuses to go further until someone admits that they broke a curtain rod in the bathroom. No wonder his wife left him. A teacher witnesses a shop teacher abuse a child then listens to the others in the teachers lounge badmouth the kid and his mother. An old guy is seriously injured in a fireworks accident during a party and refuses to get medical help. Teen girls take vaguely salacious pictures of themselves and drink heavily. One is left passed out drunk while the others run away from an angry motorist. And there was a gay thing I didn't quite follow. 

Don't be a Swede. Calling 911 is one of life's simple pleasures. You don't need permission to call paramedics. Report child abuse. If the schoolmarms turn on you, report them, too, if they give you half an excuse. I've never heard any teacher ever say anything nice or even neutral about any parent. This is apparently true even in Sweden. Calling for help is probably better than carrying an unconscious teenager to your car and driving off with her. Maybe he didn't have a cellphone.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Woody Allen's Whatever Works (2009) Evan Rachel Wood, Larry David

There were a few old Warner Bros cartoons that made reference to people in the audience. It seems like one had a silhouette of a guy getting up to leave so Yosemite Sam threatens or shoots him. The main thing I remember was being surprised that they ever showed cartoons in movie theaters. I knew some of them were made in the thirties or forties. I knew they didn't have TV then. Where did I think they were shown?

In Whatever Works, Larry David looks into the camera and speaks directly to the audience. Other people ask who he's talking to and he explains that there are people out there watching them. This might have been amusing in a theater, but I was in bed watching it on TV. 

A southern family blossoms when, one by one, they come to New York. It made it look so easy. Ed Begley, Jr, as Evan Rachel Wood's concerned father who finally tracks her down might have been like Buddy Ebsen in Breakfast at Tiffany's if Buddy Ebsen had experienced a sexual awakening when he came to the big city.

Larry David was a little hard to take in it. He's mean to the children he teaches chess to. Woody Allen wrote the part long ago for Zero Mostel. I kept trying to picture him in the role.

John Waters briefly on Bones and All

I haven't seen it, but I keep railing against Bones and All.

Here's from John Waters' ten best list:

Is there such a thing as a butch twink? Yes, there is, and Timothée Chalamet goes all Larry Clark on us here, a soft-trade hetero cannibal who kills an evil closeted gay trick so he and his flesh-eating girlfriend can feed. Is that gay-bashing or cannibally correct love? Just asking.

Shirley (2020, Josephine Decker, director)

There was a school movie of Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Lottery”. My older brother saw it in junior high was really shocked by it. I saw it in school myself a few years later. Maybe his talking about it had ruined the surprise ending, but I was so used to TV violence, I couldn’t see what the big deal was.

This came up in conversation recently. He's still unnerved by the memory.

I’ve read a couple of stories by Shirley Jackson. For some reason, I didn’t think of her as a horror writer.

The movie Shirley is about a young couple who move in with Shirley Jackson and her university professor husband. Turns out, if this movie is to be believed, she was a morbid, socially aggressive eccentric.

I don’t know why that surprises me. I guess I had this vague picture of her as a sort of Erma Bombeck.

Four Frightened People (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934)

Passengers on a ship discover that the bubonic plague is spreading among the Chinese crew. If the passengers had holed up in their cabins avoiding human contact, it might be a movie for the pandemic, but it starts with four passengers having escaped on a small boat. I don't know why they weren't free to leave, but they pay the native working the rudder and one of the guys holds a gun on him.

They go to an island. They need to get to the other side to catch another boat out of there but they'll have to go through the jungle on foot and do so in formal dress, one of the women carrying a little dog.

Claudette Colbert as a spinster geography teacher who blossoms in the jungle. Picking up the gun one of the men dropped during a brush with hostile natives did it as much as anything else.

Colbert tells off her two companions the natives left tied to a tree.

"What's got into her?" one of the men says. "She's turned into a woman."

It was reminiscent of a line from Tennesse Williams' Night of the Iguana:

"I thought you were sexless. But you've just become a woman. You know how I know that? Because you, not me, are taking pleasure in my being tied up."

Pre-code. A little implied nudity. Claudette Colbert's body double bathes in a waterfall wearing a body suit.

    

78 minutes. I watched it on DVD from Netflix.

Ms.45 (Abel Ferrara 1981)

I am reminded of the words of Black Panther Party Minister of Defense Huey Newton in a short poem: "Army .45 will stop all jive."

I remember when this movie was presented as revolutionary. It was more Death Wish than Battleship Potempkin and even then, she was as much spree killer as vigilante. 

The star described herself as a revolutionary in an interview. She was disgusted when people cheerfully told her that they used to be revolutionaries, too. If they were ever revolutionaries, they still were.

I can't remember where I read that. She was only 17 when they filmed this thing which explains a lot. 

 

The poor girl was thirty-seven when she died of heart failure caused by prolonged cocaine use. She switched to cocaine when she moved to Paris. Before that she was an enthusiastic heroin user. She was described one place as the "epitome of heroin chic".

Zoe Tamerlis plays a mute garment worker who is raped on her way home from work and again by a burglar when she gets home. She kills the second one with a household object, and good riddance to him. Then she uses his gun which I assume was a .45 automatic to kill other would-be rapists or guys she thought were would-be rapists or just guys. 

It was still a 1981 movie and one of her victims is a wealthy Arab in an elaborate keffiyeh. It wasn't so revolutionary after all.

From the director of The Bad Lieutenant. Reportedly made for $62 thousand.

The dog, Bogey, got second billing in the closing credits.

Available on Fandor.