Beautiful Boy

Bjorn Andreson

In the ad campaign for Death in Venice, they promoted Bjorn Andreson as "The most beautiful boy in the world." The kid was sixteen and he couldn't have been happy about that. No teenage boy wants to be "beautiful". Maybe if they called him "The most ruggedly masculine boy in the world". Years later, he wasn't pleased when the feminist Germaine Greer used a photo of him without his permission on the cover of her pro-ephebophilia book, The Beautiful Boy.

Now we have Timothee Chalamet in the title role of Beautiful Boy based on the book by a bourgeois father with a drug addict for a son.

It's distributed by Amazon even though Chalamet helped sabotage Rainy Day in New York which Woody Allen directed for Amazon. Chalamet was one of the stars of that movie. He later announced he was on Ronan Farrow's side, denounced Allen and said he was sorry he was in it.

The title Beautiful Boy was from a John Lennon song, but I don't know what it's supposed to mean here.

I haven't seen it but here's something from a review in the New Republic:

...But turning a drug addict into a handsome young man with good skin and a ton of potential to waste—that’s easy. All you do is cast a pretty guy and let him cry onscreen in his mother’s arms, maybe give him some poetry to read aloud. (Nic does Bukowski, and I’m not even joking.) Sprinkle a little hope on him at the end and you’ve got yourself a tragic hero. 

That’s a problem, because being addicted to drugs in 2018 means bystanders filming you passed out in a dollar store. Of course there are plenty of beloved, middle-class people who have the struggles of Ben and Nic, and their suffering cannot be denied. But in defense of sheer reality, there are a lot more addicts who can’t afford dentistry and look unattractive because of it. These are people whom you might cross the street to avoid. Homelessness isn’t Timothée Chalamet draped handsomely across a diner; it’s contemptuous glances and shame. The women and men of Heroin(e) have universally bad skin and radiate that specific narcotic waxiness that comes from long-term abuse, because that’s what it looks like. In short, drug addiction is usually a story about poverty, inflected by race, and these movies are looking in the totally opposite direction.

Blind Man (aka Blindman) 1971

At least one spaghetti western was inspired by a samurai movie. This one may have been inspired by Zatoichi, the blind swordsman.

A blind gunman helps transport fifty mailorder brides to their husbands in Texas.

Ringo Starr was hard to spot in it. The men all looked alike. I couldn't tell if he dubbed his own voice but if he did it was without the Liverpool accent.

It's all changed with the switch to video---now recording live sound is the easiest thing in the world. If you look at old books on amateur or low budget filmmaking, they give arguments for dubbing. You can hire actors (or non actors) for looks and have real actors dub their lines. You can change lines in post production and no one can tell as long as you use the same number of syllables. The director can speak to actors while filming, you can use any camera whether it's suited to live sound or not and you don't have to muffle the camera noise. You can film next to a freeway or airport, you don't have to take time for sound set-ups and you may not have to do retakes for flubbed lines. You'd have to be crazy NOT to dub.

They made interesting use of existing locations in Spain. One of the few westerns with a castle.

I couldn't follow the plot.

Going In Style (1979)

George Burns stares down preschooler.

I talked about the movie Hamsun on here a while back, about the Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian writer who was pro-Nazi even after the Germans invaded his country. The movie starts with him at 75 telling his wife he's not going to live much longer and could die at any moment. If he had known he was going to live another 18 years, he might not have been so quick to commit treason.

In Going in Style, three old men decide to give themselves a new lease on life by robbing a bank. Unlike Hamsun, they were fictional characters and, as old people in movies tend to do, they start dying for no reason. It makes their decision to become criminals seem pretty reasonable.

But George Burns was 83 when he starred in this movie. Like Hamsun, he lived another 17 years in real life, but I don't know how long his character lasted.

With Lee Strasberg and Art Carney. All three were great. It was nice seeing George Burns not being as cute as in some of the other films he made late in life.

Military punishment

One time I listened to this thing on public radio about the Lewis & Clark expedition. They were reading from journals recorded at the time. You'd be amazed at how much flogging there was. It was a military expedition and they kept flogging the troops. They kept on and on about the flogging. I can't remember why they did this, but Lewis & Clark were horrible people.

I was reminded of this when I read about the U.S. Navy eliminating "bread and water confinement" as an administrative punishment beginning in 2019. According to RT:

The administrative punishment that dates back to the age of sail was applied against sailors in the lowest three pay grades for insubordination, unauthorized absences or lewd behavior.

For example, one sailor aboard the submarine support ship USS Frank Cable was punished in the mid-1980s for running naked through the women’s berthing, Brenda Lettera, the ship’s cook, told Stripes.

“They get to eat as much bread as they want during the time,” Lettera said, explaining she gave the sailor two to three loaves for each meal. “Except for raisin bread. That wasn’t allowed.”

The punishment came into being in 1855, when the US Navy outlawed flogging. It was considered a progressive reform at the time, as the British Royal Navy continued flogging sailors until 1879.

 I had no idea anything like that existed.

Maybe it's easier than I thought

 
As a child, I had no idea how things worked. Jimmy Osmond was slightly younger than me, so when they said on TV that he was the youngest person to have a gold record, I was crushed that I would never be the youngest person to achieve this. I couldn't sing.

There was Tatum O'Neal's Oscar, the kid who played the ape boy on the old Land of the Lost who was the youngest person to get a black belt in karate---they were all slightly younger than me.

I had no idea that being a recording artist, a movie star or a martial artist required any work, that they weren't things that just fell into your lap out of nowhere.

But maybe I was right.

Andy Kindler was cast in the movie The Fiddling Horse, a role that was written for him. His friend and podcast co-host Josh "Elvis" Weinstein was given a small role in the same movie. Then, after a production delay, the star left the movie and Weinstein was promoted to star. Weinstein who was a writer and stand-up comic with no experience as an actor except for his time on Mystery Science Theater 3000 when he was a teenager.

My sister-in-law was appearing in a remake if a 1920's horror movie. Her brother dropped by the location to bring her something. He wasn't an actor, but the director saw him and gave him a pretty good part in the movie.

Timothy Bottoms' little brother was sent to spend the summer with him on the set of The Last Picture Show and they gave him a role in the movie. Didn't the poor kid have a sex scene?

And there are other cases. Tony Dow tagged along when his friend went to audition for Leave It To Beaver and was hired to play Wally himself. There were local kids in Dazed and Confused. The old guy in the diner in Midnight Run.

And, this is a different thing. We didn't have babysitters when I was past preschool. My mother didn't care. We just hung around. But she hired a high school girl to babysit us one time. She was the sister of a friend of my brother's, so I decided to keep it in mind when I heard she was a prominent extra in National Lampoon's Animal House, the blond girl in Donald Sutherland's class. I thought I'd be able to impress people with the fact that my old babysitter was an extra in a movie.

I was working at a place years later and she came in working on some charity event. I was helping her throw some trash in the dumpster. To make conversation, I said, "So...you were in Animal House, weren't you?"

She was shocked. She had no idea who I was and I didn't tell her. I let her think I was an idiot-savant who could somehow recognize movie extras I had seen twenty years earlier.

Woody Allen's 83

 
Woody Allen's 83. Just seven more years and we could have an American movie director in his 90's. That's all I'm asking for. Think of the inspiration he would be to old people everywhere.

He hasn't been popular in decades. And yet Dylan Farrow is very proud of herself for "bringing him down". He has a net worth of $80 million. She didn't bring him down that far.

She brought some harm to her mother. Mia Farrow has been exposed as a child abuser, there was talk of her being stripped of her UNICEF "ambassadorship", and we know now that she had three-way sex with Woody Allen and a teen model he was dating. People keep bringing up Mia's brother who's in prison for child molesting. She's completely alienated from a number of "her" children and two of them committed suicide.

We have the racist spectacle of Dylan and Ronan Farrow, Mia Farrow's favorite white children, slamming their Asian siblings for talking about the abuse they suffered at the hands of their sick narcissist of a mother. Dylan and Ronan have no idea how Mia Farrow treated Moses and Soon-yi as children--when Ronan was four, Moses was starting high school and Soon-yi was in college. Ronan was three or four when Mia Farrow coaxed Dylan into making her false accusation again Allen----he doesn't know anything except what his mother drilled into him.

I know I'm repeating myself.

The trouble is that Allen is in it for the money. He gets paid his directing fee and his writing fee whether the movies make a profit or not.

He's been steadily downgrading over the years. At one point he started using a cheaper crew. His old crew was working cheap anyway and they were naturally upset when he callously dumped them. They had complained that he cut their pay while he was still living it up with his rich friends on location. He quit doing all the re-shooting he used to do. His movies still cost what seems like a lot considering that they're just scenes of people talking.

He should look at Eric Rohmer. Rohmer kept cutting down on his crew, eliminating jobs. I hear his last movie was just him, a camera operator and a sound guy. 

And there was Manoel de Oliviera. He was 106 and was working on a movie when he died. They were filming it in a garden close to his home to make it easier on him. Woody Allen couldn't do that? Have two guys and some actors at that vacation mansion he bought with his Midnight in Paris money?

Merry Xmas!

Ah! Christmas eve! The holiday is so much better without a Christmas tree, presents or decorations! My mother hasn't recovered completely after being in the hospital. I ordered presents she wants to give people on Amazon. But she told me she didn't get me anything. I told her not to.

My brothers won't be able to come to town, my sister is out of town with her husband. I figured I'd have a few extra days to shop but now I'm out of time.

I know a few places that'll be open Xmas day, but I'll probably run over to the hospital cafeteria and get a couple of Xmas dinners to go.