Getting Straight (1970)

I saw this movie a couple of times when I was in high school. They kept showing it at the university. I didn't realize they filmed it at the local community college.

Elliott Gould plays a former campus radical Vietnam Veteran who returns to college to get his teaching credential. He's trying to graduate. His professors are mad at him and he's trying to focus on school rather than political activism. He rails against his girlfriend (Candice Bergen's) petit bourgeois tendencies while pursuing a teaching career himself.

Things were very different back then. 

"Why, Harry? Why a teaching credential?" a friend asks.

"Money...money and power and little girls to molest!" he says. "It's a great life."

It was presumably a joke, but he shouted this on a crowded campus. And, come to think of it, he was teaching a freshman English class and sleeps with one of his students.

He calls his girlfriend a "dumb broad" at one point and there are a couple of anti-gay things. He was pretty stodgy for a radical.

He struggles to pay his $150 tuition, but that was over $1,000 in today's money. You could buy a ten-year-old car for $150 back then, but cars weren't built to last ten years in those days. Elliott Gould drives a 1958 Bel Air, only 12-years-old when this thing was filmed, but it was a hopeless wreck.

He probably wouldn't have been much of a teacher. He yells a lot and flies off the handle. If he had been a music major, it could have been a prequel to Mr Holland's Opus.

With Harrison Ford in a small role.

Robert Blake RIP

Maybe he was innocent. They never found the murder weapon. He was the obvious suspect but that's not really evidence.

If he murdered his horrible wife he was an idiot. His "alibi" was that he was fifty feet away for a minute or two while he went to get his gun. 

He was great in In Cold Blood and Electra Glide in Blue. One of the few actors left who worked with Humphrey Bogart. 

Robert Blake died yesterday at age 89.

The poor devil had a horrible childhood, then Leonard Maltin blamed him for how bad The Little Rascals became when MGM took over the series. 

Dark Shadows (2012) and Spencer (2021)

Two soap operas that didn't work for me

I'd watched old episodes of Dark Shadows on the streaming channel Pluto. It was an after-school soap opera from the late '60's. Came on at four o'clock. Kids would hurry home from school to watch. It was a little before my time. I wasn't old enough to get into it, but my sister had some friends who did and I learned recently that I have a cousin who loved it.

But it was a soap opera. A real soap opera on five days a week. Filmed live on tape. Every episode had a flubbed line here and there and sometimes the camera would pan too far and you could see past the edge of the set. But it was all dialogue, every scene a long conversation.

So I turned on the movie starring Johnny Depp. It was mostly a series of montages. I couldn't get into it. It had the same basic plot, but little in common with the original series.

Watched about half, turned it off and started Spencer, something about Princess Diana. But it was the same thing. There've been so many shows about her and the various royals. We know who they were and pretty much know what went on. But the movie was another trashy soap opera they tried to improve on by making it non-verbal. 

It looked impressive, but I want to hear their conniving.

 

Nobody (2021, Bob Odenkirk)

I thought it'd be comedic since it starred Bob Odenkirk, but it wasn't. Would any 58-year-old man do all that stuff even if he could? Very violent with implausible fight scenes that went on and on. 

A few things in it were reminiscent of Breaking Bad. There's a Dodge Challenger, there are pallets stacked with bundles of money, there's a dangerous old man in a nursing home. 

I'm not sure a guy pushing 60 would survive all those punches to the face. I wondered about that watching John Wayne's later movies--and he always smiled when people punched him. There was a woman in her 50's around here who decided to take up boxing. I guess she was in shape to do it, but she went into a coma after her first bout.

They were careful to make it clear that Bob Odenkirk did his own fight scenes.

Harry & Meghan

Someone kindly shared their Netflix log in information with me. They've had Netflix for years and almost never watched it, so Netflix still comes out way ahead. They've canceled it but still have two weeks to go.

To be honest, I turned this thing on and haven't paid close attention to it. I don't think I missed anything. It's stuff we already knew or safely assumed. Look at those people! Would you marry into that family? Harry and Meghan were right to get out, but it shouldn't take six hours to say why.

It's like most reality TV, about rich people who don't deserve to be rich.

I have Episode One on as I write this. They're talking about their second date. They met at a restaurant. Harry thinks something is funny.

"You were late," Harry explains.

"I was late?"

"Yes. Remember?"

A moment of spontaneous levity.

I can't sympathize with Harry at all. He's a killer and always walked around wearing stupid-looking uniforms. He even wore one to his wedding. Meghan wore a big giant wedding dress. Had to have children help carry it. 

We see them fleeing Canada in a private jet. They're going to California where they'll stay with a "friend" who's a rich guy they never met.

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.