Action movies

So, I had watched the Soviet "western", White Sun of the Desert, a while back. It was an action film set in the 1920s. Made in 1969. The bonus material on the DVD included interviews with the two writers who wrote the script. One of them noted that the movie was hugely popular with the Soviet public, but not with people in the film industry who noted that the action scenes were all done through montage rather than stunts and continuous action.

I was just reading an article on cracked.com discussing how action movies had changed. One of the changes was that now movie violence is done this way, cut into short takes. They contrasted fight scenes from Jackie Chan movies and wondered why Matt Damon had to learn all that karate for a spy movie when it was all faked through editing anyway.

Also kind of interesting was the reason all the movie stars now look like body builders. It turns out that they're just moderately muscular like they used to be, but now they lose all their body fat to make them more sinewy. Anybody can have visible stomach muscles. I had friends who were painfully thin in high school and they had visible stomach muscles. All you need is no body fat. You can do all the sit-ups you want and nobody's going to see your stomach muscles unless you're dangerously fat free.

Watched several movies

Watched several movies the last couple days.

John Waters' Cecil B Demented really wasn't very good. Maybe because it was a movie about making movies. This was Waters' Day for Night except Day for Night wasn't awful. All one note.

A Colt is My Passport. I didn't entirely understand the title since the guy had a Baretta not a Colt, and he had a valid passport in the first place. A very stylish Japanese gangster movie. Black and white. It's hard for me to care about gangsters. I say kill them all. Made in the late '60s. The music seemed to be influenced by spaghetti westerns. It had guitar and whistling. Like a minimalist rendition of a spaghetti western soundtrack.

Several movies by Mark Rappaport are on Fandor. They were interesting. He used a lot of green screen, (or rear screen projection, or front screen projection) his movies had very small casts and were entirely verbal with a lot of dialog and narration. You should watch them. See what you think.

Watched Rappaport's "Postcards"---a couple's relationship evolves as they exchange postcards while the guy is on an extended business trip, two more short films, "Mur 19", "Blue Streak", and feature films The Scenic Route, Mozart in Love, Chain Letter, Local Color, and Imposters which I enjoyed the most so far.

Still need to see Exterior Night.

Rappaport's documentary The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender about gay undercurrents in Hollywood movies was great. Several more I have yet to see.

I remember seeing some of this on Siskel & Ebert years ago (back when it was Sneak Previews on PBS). They showed clips of Rappaport's "Mark Rappaport: The TV Spinoff".

I wonder what movies that nutjob Ray Carney is depriving us of.

Life Itself - documentary about the life of Roger Ebert

Several years ago, CNN reported for several days about a child who had been attacked by a shark in Florida. In a very unfortunate coincidence, Time-Life was marketing a set of jazz CDs. Their ads played on CNN over and over. And their ad started with Louis Armstrong singing "Mack the Knife" which begins "...the shark has pretty teeth, dear, and he shows then pearly white..."

I thought of this when they talked about Roger Ebert as editor of his university newspaper when Kennedy was assassinated. One article in he paper showed a picture of JFK when he visited the university years earlier. The paper was already in production but Ebert stopped the presses when he realized that an ad on the opposite page had a drawing of a Minuteman pointing his musket at the photo of Kennedy.

Some other things from the movie:

Roger Ebert was a recovering alcoholic. He liked hanging around in bars in Chicago, but he finally realized he had to give it up. It surprised me because he appeared in Charles Bukowski's novel Hollywood about the making of the movie Barfly. Bukowski liked Ebert in part because he was drinking screwdrivers.

Gene Siskel was a swinger. At least at one point in his life. Hugh Hefner took a liking to him and he hung around the Playboy Mansion for a time and flew around on whatever Hefner called his private jet.

Ebert lived in a cheap little apartment and Siskel was always afraid he would quit the TV show. He was ecstatic when Ebert got married because it meant he would have expenses and couldn't walk away.

One time, Ebert was hanging around a bar with a prostitute. Back then, he was always hanging around with horrible women. He finally met his very lovely wife at an AA meeting.

He was great writer even in college. Was sort of overbearing and arrogant as editor of the school paper, but he was very good at it, so they put with him.

The Chicago Sun-Times where Ebert worked was the Working Class paper and had an African-American readership. The Chicago Tribune was white and bourgeois.

The documentary mentioned the terrible power Siskel and Ebert had. They didn't mention this in the movie, but I remember when Warren Beatty was asked about the death of Gene Siskel, and he said he didn't know movie critics ever died. Beatty had blamed Siskel and Ebert for the failure of Ishtar, and he had a point. Siskel and Ebert attacked the movie because the intentionally bad songs were bad.

Another critic described Siskel and Eberts show(s) as "consumer advice", not criticism. But the documentary also noted that they gave publicity to movies that wouldn't have been widely seen otherwise.

Ebert dismissed the idea that film criticism was dead. Thought the internet had brought about a renaissance in criticism.

Jeremy Clarkson

They're talking about the terrible mistake the BBC made firing Jeremy Clarkson. ITV will snatch him up! But I doubt Clarkson will come out of this with his popularity unscathed. There are people who watched him in spite of how obnoxious and racist he was, and many will decide they can't stomach him anymore. It might start sinking in with some of the human garbage who are defending him that he threw a temper tantrum and attacked a man because hotel room service stopped serving hot food.

The English must have SOME self-respect left. They're already seen around the world as an inbred race of football hooligans. The world knows all about Jimmy Savile. The Brits finally started prosecuting some of the sadomasochistic pedophiles who ran their entire school system at least until the late 1980s. Do they really want Jeremy Clarkson to be the sagging, bulbous face of Great Britain?

Giant Gila Monster (1959)

The Giant Gila Monster wimped out. A 1950s horror movie. Rather bad in some respects. The special effects consisted of a Gila Monster walking around on a miniature set. You never see an actor in the same shot. Of course, that wouldn't have fooled anyone anyway. 

Young hot rodder Chase Winstead works as a mechanic, supporting his widowed mother, his disabled little sister and his French girlfriend in rural Texas. He's saving his money to buy leg braces for his sister so she'll be able to walk. He's also friends with the sheriff who seems to be the only cop in the area, and he's leader of the other hot rodders, making them behave.

And he's a singer. Doesn't have a band or anything, but he has a banjo-like ukelele.
 
The movie starts with two teens snuggling in their car when the Giant Gila monster attacks. The boy's father is an obnoxious rich guy who threatens the sheriff if he doesn't find his missing son. The sheriff then goes and talks to the girl's honest, decent, working class parents.

Chase Winstead's father was killed working on one of the rich guy's oil rigs.

In the end, the rich guy somehow has the power to fire the sheriff, take his badge and become sheriff himself.

Wouldn't the movie have been better if the rich guy had died a horrible death while Chase and the sheriff do nothing to help him?

The sheriff could say, "Let him bleed!" like Walter White.

Should Chase have been more tormented? Should he have had scenes in his room of him yelling at God, like Robert Duvall in The Apostle? He's a nice guy. Why must he suffer so?

You'd think that a giant poisonous lizard attacking cars and eating people would be enough to carry a movie, that you wouldn't need all the subplots.

Jeremy Clarkson, Jimmy Savile

You have to be pretty good-looking to be referred to as a "bad boy" instead of "a dick."
--J. Elvis Weinstein

So, the BBC learned its lesson. They spent decades covering up for pedophile, necrophile and probable child murderer Jimmy Savile and his pal, Rolf Harris. Harris is now in prison for child molesting.

They just fired violent racist BBC star Jeremy Clarkson. The British millionaire physically assaulted a producer, punching him repeatedly for thirty seconds until a witness intervened. Clarkson flew into a rage when the victim informed him that it was too late to get hot food from hotel room service. Clarkson couldn't have steak and chips.

Clarkson is 54. Rather astonishing. He doesn't look a day under 75.

Look at comments on the internet to see the kind of English scum that support Clarkson. They were attacking Clarkson's victim, calling for him to be murdered in some cases.

I'm beginning to wonder about the British. Jimmy Savile was their biggest celebrity. He was huge----able to get away with monstrous crimes. Can you imagine an American star so big that he would be allowed to spend the night in a morgue abusing the corpses?

And Savile was repulsive. Even if you didn't know he was a child molester, necrophile and murderer you would think he was repulsive. But the British looked at him and saw Cary Grant, Warren Beatty, Brad Pitt----and I don't now who else because I'm not really a judge of male beauty----all rolled into one.

And now we're finding out that the Brits love Jeremy Clarkson just as much. He's their one big star. This horrible, prematurely aged troll whose whole act is to be as obnoxious as possible. To them, he's a young Paul Newman. He's actually the BBC's biggest star, if you can believe that.

Kirk Cameron---he's just so dumb

Religious beliefs are mostly innocuous. They're fine. I don't care. But Kirk Cameron is so dumb.

That's the problem with the guy---not his religiosity, just that he's too big an idiot to realized how big an idiot he is. He challenged Stephen Hawking to a battle of wits. In fact, he expressed pity for Hawking.

"...to say anything negative about Stephen Hawking is like bullying a blind man," Cameron said. "He has an unfair disadvantage, and that gives him a free pass on some of his absurd ideas. Professor Hawking is heralded as ‘the genius of Britain,’ yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life.”

Just embarrassing, Kirk Cameron patronizing Stephen Hawking.

Cameron has been spouting that "nothing created everything" line for years and apparently thinks it's profound.