Now they're picking on Nick Stahl

And now they've accused innocent Nick Stahl of "lewd conduct". Sounds like the only "evidence" against him is the word of some LAPD vice cop, cruising the porn shops to make sure none of the consumers of pornography see anything lewd.

Turns out that this was the same unit of the vice squad that targeted Fred Willard. I never believed for an instant that Willard was guilty of anything.

I know almost nothing about Stahl, but considering what the cops did to Willard, I don't believe anything they say.

Nick Stahl, Man Without a Face, military school

Nick Stahl was the kid in Mel Gibson's Man Without A Face. He played a kid who actually WANTED to go to military school.

Has military school changed over the years? I knew a kid who saw an ad for a Naval military school in the back of a magazine. He was crying and pleading with his mother to go to the school while she tried to explain that military schools were for wealthy juvenile delinquents, not kids who wanted to join the Navy.

She probably should have sent the kid. He graduated from high school, joined the Navy, and quickly realized he had made a horrible mistake.

There was a 1963 episode of The Lucy Show where Lucy disguises herself as a cadet to visit her son in military school. When I was a kid watching that, military school looked fun. You got to dress up and run around with a toy gun. When I saw it again as a teenager, I wondered what kind of monster would send her son to military school.

On The Beverly Hillbillies, they put Jethro in military school. He was in the 6th grade, was the biggest kid in class and was surprisingly popular.

I saw an old B western where the cowboys save an orphan from outlaws then send him to military school. If I lived in a B movie version of the Old West, military school might not seem that bad to me, either.

Killing Bono

For some reason, I watched a movie called Killing Bono. It really wasn't my thing.

Two brothers, Neil and Ivan McCormick, were high school classmates of Bono while the band U2 was being formed. Bono wanted Ivan to join U2, but the older brother, Neil, told him no because they were forming their own band.

When U2 hits it big, Neil is wracked with guilt for stopping his brother from joining. He becomes driven to succeed, but makes one terrible decision after another, refusing to compromise on any point all the while withering in U2's shadow.

The movie got kind of dreary, watching someone do one idiotic thing after another. He and his brother would actually have been fairly successful if he hadn't turned down one opportunity after another. Rod Stewart wanted to record their song, but he was old and Neil didn't want to compromise. They had a chance to open for U2, but Neil wanted to play for his own fans, not U2's.

Like I said, the movie really wasn't my thing. I don't listen to much music. If I did, it wouldn't be U2 or their competitors. I don't know what Bono's thing is. He's basically a right-winger but I have the impression that he's too dumb to realize it.

In an article on CounterPunch.com, Dave Marsh related that Bono publicly challenged him to a debate on Marsh's view “that celebrity politics has been a pretty much complete failure”.  Marsh agreed to debate, but Bono chickened out, backed out of the challenge he made, and gave no explanation.

Read the whole article here:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/03/19/sir-bono-the-knight-who-fled-from-his-own-debate/

From the article:

I don’t know why Bono spit the bit on debating these issues in a public forum with a well-informed antagonist. Maybe he decided that he’d fucked up and was about to lower himself by going head to head with a journalist. Maybe he doesn’t want to deal on the spot with descriptions of his repeated appearances at the conferences of the leading capitalist nations where he’s yet to ask his first hard question about anything but Africa; about his settling for promises from world leaders that patently weren’t going to be kept, and never doing more than mewing when they weren’t; about why it is that Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, by no means an anti-capitalist, observes that she met him “at a party to raise money for Africans, and there were no Africans in the room, except for me,” or why so many other Africans have complained that he claims to speak for them but has never so much as asked their permission. In regard to the last, I did receive more courtesy than Andrew Mwenda, the Ugandan journalist Bono cursed for raising such questions at an economics conference. (But then, I’m white and Celtic-American.)

...

...The band’s decision to have its song publishing company flee Ireland for a tax haven in the Netherlands has been subject to protests in the streets of Dublin and has no obvious justification, despite Bono’s fatuous counterclaim that it is his critics who are the hypocrites because free-market values were what created the “Celtic Tiger” of Dublin’s capitalist boom economy. The Tiger’s death throes look to be particularly messy, in part because of capital flight of just U2’s kind. The band’s attempt to alter the Dublin skyline with its Clarence Hotel expansion is another example of its ruinous distance from everyday Irish reality.

...

“During the band’s performance of ‘In The Name of Love,’” wrote Hegarty, “he described Martin Luther King’s dream as ‘Not just an American dream–also an Irish dream, a European dream, an African dream, an Israeli dream . . .’ And then, following a long pause reminiscent of a man who’d just realized he’d left the gas on, he added, ‘. . . and also a Palestinian dream.’ This was his big shout out to the Palestinians… You can’t help but marvel at this latest expression of Bono’s Sesame Street view of the world. Hey Middle East, we just have to have a dream to get along.

 ...

Bono is no man of peace–he has yet to speak out against any war. Bono is part owner of Pandemic/Bioware, producers of Mercenaries 2, a video game which simulates an invasion of Venezuela. Last year Bono met with US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to discuss plans to set up a new U.S. military command for Africa. Forbes, the magazine Bono co-owns, constantly beats the drums for war (Bono says he was attracted to the magazine because it has a “consistent philosophy”).

...Bono sings the praises of some of the most warlike public figures. It starts with Dubya and Blair—Bono praised the UK prime minister for “doing the things he believed in.” He clearly meant to include massive British involvement in the war in Iraq. Bono also has nothing but praise for arch-reactionaries such as Jesse Helms and Billy Graham. In the video for Pat Boone’s video, “Thank You Billy Graham,” Bono intones “I give thanks for the sanity of Billy Graham, a singer of the human spirit.” Interesting. In 1966, Graham followed LBJ to the podium at the National Prayer Breakfast to give a ringing endorsement of the war in Vietnam. “There are those,” Graham said, “who have tried to reduce Christ to a genial and innocuous appeaser; but Jesus said ‘You are wrong—I have come as a firesetter and sword-wielder. I am come to send fire down on earth!” Sing that human spirit, Billy—you’ve got Bono on harmonies. Indeed, surrounded by America’s most hawkish politicians, Bono gave a fawning keynote speech at the 2008 National Prayer Breakfast. In a recent interview with the British music magazine Q, U2 drummer Larry Mullen said he “cringes” when he sees Bono hanging out with George Bush and Tony Blair, adding that those two world leaders should be tried as “war criminals.”

...

Despite the inspiration that many people take from the anthems Bono has written, there is not one shred of evidence that he disagrees on any issue—war, tax shelters, immigration—with the power brokers he wants us to believe are the last best hope of mankind.

No, Bono and U2 and rock and roll in general don't interest me.

But I understand the two fellows in this movie being ticked off at their more successful former classmates and I understand being rivals with someone who's so much more successful that they have no idea any rivalry exists.

I know a number of jazz musicians. Jazz doesn't sell terribly well. Jazz musicians (not counting Kenny G) are infinitely better musicians than rock stars, but they reach a far smaller audience. So watching this movie, Neil and Ivan's modest success as rock stars looked pretty good to me. They were doing quite well.

They shouldn't have thought of themselves as failed rock stars. They should have thought of themselves as incompetent yet wildly successful jazz musicians.

A couple of documentaries about big budget failure

Watched a couple of documentaries. One was about the making of Heaven's Gate. The director, Michael Cimino, told someone that he would tell the studio what they wanted to hear then do whatever he wanted. Apparently, his plan from the start was to spend as much money as he could on his western. He didn't care that it started out with a seven million dollar budget. It ended up costing over $35 million.

This was not long after the head of United Artists and their top executives left to form Orion Pictures. The fellows left in charge of UA weren't terribly experienced. They wanted to prove themselves. United Artists was raking in money off the James Bond movies and some other series they already had going. But they wanted to do something new. So...in the wake of Cimino's winning an Oscar for The Deer Hunter, they wanted to make a movie with him. I don't know why they thought a western was a good idea.

Executives knew they had a big problem, but they thought the movie would probably be really good even if it cost a fortune, and they already spent this much on it----should they keep going and spend even more or simply write off the fortune Cimino already wasted?

I don't know. Heaven's Gate, it turns out, was considered pretty good in Europe. In America, critics hated it, although their reaction came in part from all the news reports on its problems during production.

Cimino was a jackass. Now he's in his 70s and appears to have had extensive plastic surgery (he says he just lost weight.) His appearance has changed to the point that there are rumors he had a sex change.

He's made several movies since then. He managed to stay on schedule and on budget on them, apparently, but his other weaknesses as a director have become more evident.

Then I watched Lost in La Mancha, about Terry Gilliam's attempt to make a film based on Don Quixote. He mentions at one point that it could be cursed, like "the Scottish play", something that's just bad luck. There have been other attempts to film the story and none of them have succeeded.

According to Wikipedia, Gilliam has documentaries made about the production of his movies so that, if things go horribly wrong, there will be a record of it from his point of view, so the world won't think he's another Michael Cimino.

In this case, the movie was going to be the most expensive movie funded entirely by European sources ever made (I don't know if that includes the Soviet production of War and Peace) but things went badly from the start of production. The star turned out to have a herniated disc and had to leave, it turned out that they were filming next to a NATO bombing range (they went ahead anyway and decided to dub the sound) and there was a huge rain storm and flash flood the first day of shooting which permanently changed the looks of the location. They tried to keep going somehow, but they had to pull the plug after spending $15 million.

These things happen.

In the documentary, they kept referring to Gilliam's Baron Munchausen movie, which did go way over budget and gave people the idea that Gilliam was out of control.


I never liked Gilliam's movies that well. I think I expected them to be funnier since he was a Monty Python guy. I should watch them again.

He should have directed the Harry Potter movies. His criticism of Steven Spielberg I heard in YouTube is interesting:

"Spielberg, and the success of most films in Hollywood these days, I think is down to the fact that [they're] comforting, they tie things up in nice little bows, gives you answers, even if the answers are stupid. We go home and we don't have to worry about it. The Kubricks of this world and the great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.

"...There's a wonderful quote in the book that Freddie Raphael wrote about Eyes Wide Shut---it was called Eyes Wide Open---and he's talking to Kubrick about Schindler's List and the Holocaust, and he says, 'The thing is that Schindler's List is about success; the Holocaust was about failure.' And that's Kubrick. Spot on.

"Schindler's List had to--we had to save those few people. Happy ending. A man can do what a man can do, and stop death for a few people. That's not what the Holocaust is about. It's about complete failure of civilization that allows six million people to die."

In the documentary on Heaven's Gate, they kept referring to Cimino having directed Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, produced by and starring Clint Eastwood. Cimino stayed on schedule and on budget. He had no choice because Clint Eastwood was there. Eastwood didn't like wasting time. If they were taking too long to set up a shot, he would tell them it was good enough, let's just do it, and they had to beg him to do retakes.

Eastwood has said that filmmakers are going for a level of perfection that really isn't necessary.

On the other hand, I was watching Reel Geezers on You Tube, movie reviews by a pair of elderly film industry retirees. They reviewed Eastwood's Gran Torino. One didn't think it was that good and that the problem was that they didn't do retakes and they didn't do enough to help the younger cast members with their performances.

I don't know if Clint Eastwood is just thrifty, or if he doesn't have the sensitivity to know that his movies could be a lot better, although retakes would have been wasted on Cimino. He wasn't interested in actors, just in the visuals. His background was filming intricately choreographed TV commercials. His thing was arranging actors on the screen. If it ever seemed that he did more than that, it was by accident.

Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Django

Spike Lee has spoken out against Quentin Tarantino's movie, Django Unchained.

"All I'm going to say is that it's disrespectful to my ancestors. That's just me... I'm not speaking on behalf of anybody else."

Lee tweeted: "American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western.It Was A Holocaust.My Ancestors Are Slaves.Stolen From Africa.I Will Honor Them."

One "academic" argued with him----apparently, he thought the word "holocaust" didn't exist before the Nazi genocide and could refer only to events that were exactly like the Nazi genocide. Even if he had been right, it had nothing to do with the movie. Fifty to a hundred million black people died in the slave trade, by the way.


When I was in high school, some friends and I started writing a novel. It opened with a private eye going to a neo-Nazi compound in Idaho and freely killing neo-Nazis in order to capture a Nazi war criminal they were harboring. One of my friends pointed out that the hero murdered a lot of more or less innocent neo-Nazis, but he took the actual Nazi war criminal in alive so he could get a fair trial.

Not long after that, I was horrified at what we had written. We trivialized Nazi genocide, used it in what we intended as a pulp novel. I wouldn't dream of doing that now.

I haven't seen Tarantino's movie, but making a big budget spaghetti western exploiting slavery in the way he did seems like a terrible idea, or at least something you want to approach very carefully. I don't think Tarantino has the sensitivity to pull it off.

I read a lesbian parody of a Nancy Drew novel which was great until we find out that Nancy was raped by her father who was then murdered by their housekeeper. You don't want to put such strong material in that context.

One tweeter responded to Lee: "MAN I been waiting for you to speak on it! Never is there a point in Inglorious Bastards where Jews are the butt of the joke..."

Some more Breaking Bad stuff

There was Planet of the Apes, a planet where apes act like people and people act like apes. That wasn't exactly what it was about. But that was the general idea.

But then you had the Planet of the Apes TV series and the movie Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Suddenly people and apes could both talk and carry on conversations, and the series became completely pointless.

That's what's happened with Breaking Bad. I know I've said this before.

It started as a very nice story of a mild mannered-yet- angry and embittered high school chemistry teacher becoming a criminal. He was a fish out of water. He couldn't discipline his unruly students, but he found himself facing down extremely dangerous, violent drug lords.

But once we got past that---once Walter White learned the ropes---all we had left was a story about an especially vile criminal, and who wants to see that?

It would like if The Beverly Hillbillies had evolved into something like Dynasty or Falcon Crest.

I don't know how the people of Albuquerque feel about the series. What kind of a crime rate does that place have? Because, on the show, one lawyer knows scores of people who can provide almost any criminal service. There was a guy would confess to crimes and go to prison in your place, there was a guy who would whisk you out of the country and help you disappear completely, there were hitmen, hired killers, Nazis who could arrange murders in jails and prisons. There's money laundering, children working as drug dealers then being murdered by drug dealers.

It seems kind of surprising that a major drug lord could pose and live as a fast food manager. Wouldn't this leave him rather vulnerable? In fact, the guy's criminal enterprise seems to be dependent on a handful of people. One of them got shot and the whole thing fell apart.

Well. the show doesn't have much longer to go. There was a flash-forward that gave the impression that there will be a terribly violent conclusion.

The Walking Dead

Last year, I got a Walking Dead dvd for Xmas.

I'm watching it now before Christmas is upon us. I may have to answer the question, "Hey, did you watch that DVD I gave you last year?"

Man. It's kind of depressing.

I was always creeped out by the nuclear war movies from the '50s and '60s, movies like The Day the World Ended and This is Not a Test. But reading The Stand by Stephen King, the apocalypse sounded sort of fun in its way.

I don't know what the wave of zombie movies tells you about society. There was the wave of vampire stuff around the time of the AIDS epidemic, spread by blood.

What's the zombie thing about? Economic crisis? The country on the verge of collapse? I suspect it's coming.

How many unburied bodies are there lying around, anyway? Doesn't seem like people rising from the dead would be that serious a problem. And I never understood why zombies don't eat each other, like sharks in a feeding frenzy. How can zombies even tell who's a zombie and who's not? The movie Shaun of the Dead noted this problem.

Gilligan's Island vs. Lawrence of Arabia

When I was a kid, I was inspired watching old Roger Corman movies. They were reasonably professional, but cheap enough that you felt like you could be a filmmaker, too. I never understood Steven Spielberg who said he was inspired by Lawrence of Arabia.

Was Spielberg more ambitious than I was? Well, yes, OBVIOUSLY he was. But was that why he was so inspired by David Lean?

The lowest level of art appreciation is judging an artistic work according to how difficult it was for the artist to create it. Admiration for the early works of Roger Corman simply shows a higher level of art appreciation. I was just a lot smarter than Spielberg, that's all.

When I saw Lawrence of Arabia in the '80s when it was re-released to theaters, I noted it was long but very gripping. Could I possibly do the same thing? Here was my idea----instead of making a long movie that seemed much shorter, take a long script and actually cram it into a shorter movie.

This was Gilligan's Island's appeal. It was a top-rated show up until the day it was cancelled. And one reason for its success was that they took long scripts and packed them into a half hour.


To some degree, movies are made the way they are simply to look expensive. Look almost every commercially produced movie of the 1980s. The camera moves constantly. Every shot was a tracking shot. And this was done for no reason I can see except to make them look expensive.

I suspect this is the reason why, in this era where people can and do make movies for practically nothing---movies where the only expense is the cost of charging the camcorder battery and turning on the computer---Hollywood is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to produce stuff that's just crap. They need to do something to distinguish themselves.

If, today, you wanted to make a shot-for-shot remake of Gone With The Wind, making full use of blue screen technology and digitally generated imagery, how cheaply could it be done?