Live and Let Die

 

I turned on Live and Let Die late last night. I watched a little. I didn't understand why James Bond was so worried about M catching him with a woman in his apartment. I realized that all I wanted to see was the speedboat chase in the end even though it dragged on too long and they kept cutting away to the funny sheriff. But it was a long, mostly dull movie and I didn't want to sit through it. I turned it off.

How many of these movies were about James Bond murdering Black people? I looked at a copy of the novel in a bookstore and was rather shocked. They had reprinted the British version which used an especially vile racial slur in one of the chapter titles.

Brand Upon the Brain, Guy Maddin, viewer comments

I posted something about this long ago---I had listened to an interview with Guy Maddin. He said at one point that he had read a bunch of comments on his work on IMDb and found it depressing. The reviews people posted were lousily written with bad use of the first person pronoun. Some people were annoyed by him, but the people who liked him apparently hurt his feelings, too.

I heard that and posted about it here and quoted him. I don't know how long ago that was. But for some reason it wasn't until a couple days ago that I bothered to read the comments he was talking about.

They were very long. Some of it was a little embarrassing. They should have been shorter, just hinted at an intellectual analysis. And, as Guy Maddin said, they should have laid off the first person pronoun.

Although. What are you supposed to do? Refer to yourself in the third person?

It makes me rethink some of the stuff I've written here. For example, my bitter attacks on the Utah-made family westerns Seven Alone and Against a Crooked Sky. I had seen Seven Alone when my entire school walked downtown to see it. I was surprised that you could show Indians being killed in a G-rated movie. I like violent movies, but I was generally on the Indians' side, especially against these terrible people. The father in the movie was in a constant rage. I didn't know why the children were upset when he finally had the good taste to drop dead. Everything seemed much more pleasant after that.

I thought Against a Crooked Sky was a sex movie. Why was the farm boy so attached to his suckling calf? Why was he spying on his naked sister? The movie made sure we knew the actress was really naked. She does that hand bra thing, holding a hand over each breast, then we see one buttock as she climbs out of the water. I would have assumed she was wearing a strapless one piece swimsuit if they hadn't done all that. She's kidnapped by Indians. The young fellow sets out to find her and is helped by Richard Boone who keeps talking about his Oedipal conflict with his son. "He took after his Ma," he said, which has more than one meaning. Boone says he murdered his son and they killed even more Indians in this movie and it still got a G rating.



People really liked Seven Alone. I almost never get comments, but they posted on here, enthused over it and didn't understand why I was slamming it. Maybe I was wrong.

Here's a filmmaking tip from Stewart Petersen, the Jean-Pierre Leaud of Utah regional cinema: If you film someone running barefoot in a field, put duct tape on the soles of their feet.

Any psycho-sexual elements in Guy Maddin's movies seem contrived. He knows what he's doing. With a movie like Against a Crooked Sky, the auteurs had no idea what perversity was gushing from their subconscious minds.

Against a Crooked Sky would have been pretty good if it had been silent, filmed in high contrast black and white, shot with several Super 8 cameras running at the same time and if the mother had been the villain.

No Greater Glory (1934)

Supposedly anti-war, but made it look fun. There was at least one Little Rascals short that seemed to be inspired by this. Based on the Hungarian novel A Pál utcai fiúk (The Paul Street Boys) about some sixth graders who fight a war with the junior high kids over what they keep calling a vacant lot although it's apparently used to store lumber. It seems like an extremely dangerous place for them to be using as a playground. Why don't they play in the railroad yard instead? According to Wikipedia, it's a popular young adult novel in Israel (at least among Jewish kids) which is pretty good reason to doubt it's really anti-war.

Like that West German movie, The Bridge, the first supposedly anti-war West German movie made after World War Two. It took the capitalist German movie industry until 1959 to decide that World War Two was bad. It could just as easily been considered pro-war except that some of the Nazis blub during the fighting. I've seen explicitly pro-war movies made during the war that were intended to spur enlistment that made it look far worse.

It's available on The Criterion Channel.

Don't Look Back (1967)

That's Allen Ginsberg in the background.

I promised myself some years ago that if I ever met Bob Dylan, I would act surprised and say Hi, how are you, good luck, but I wouldn't mean it.

Does he expect us to believe he can't sing any better than that?

Well. That's fine. I'm looking at Don't Look Back made by the late D.A. Pennebaker. I had seen it around 1980 late at night at the local arthouse. The place had been a old funeral home. I had no interest in Bob Dylan or music in general and I went with a friend who I don't think knew who he was. I don't know what drew us there. My friend seemed delighted by the film. I was on Dylan's side during the throwing the glass out of the window scene. He seemed like an awful person much of the time, but it seemed like an affectation and I don't know if that made it better or worse.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Trump and Biden: Two birds with one stone?

Hunter Biden is a degenerate. He left his wife and children so he could sleep with his brother's widow, in divorce court, his wife said that he spent vast amounts of money on drugs and "girlfriends". He joined the Navy in a special program that allowed to him to become an officer by taking two weeks of classes---they had to give him a couple of waivers because he was too old and had a "drug incident" in his past---he told the press how joining the Navy was the greatest moment of his life, then he was kicked out less than a month later because he tested positive for cocaine.

Nothing qualified Hunter Biden to go to work for Bursima Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, except that his father was in charge of the Obama regime's Ukraine policy. Hunter Biden was paid $50,000 a month for what, exactly, I don't know. The money was sent to him through a company owned by John Kerry's stepson.

Joe Biden told this hilarious anecdote to the Council on Foreign Relations about how he got a prosecutor allegedly investigating Bursima fired:

"I said, 'You're not getting the [$1 billion]. I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a bitch. He got fired." 

My hope is that Trump will be impeached and removed but, in self defense, he will end Biden's run for the nomination by exposing how corrupt he and his degenerate son are.

Oh, and after Trump is removed, I hope to heck Mike Pence will be severely weakened and unable to do anything as president. Because that guy won't be any improvement.

Remember that other thing?

They thought they had Trump on some illegal campaign contribution thing because they paid to stop a porn star from revealing her adulterous affair with him, but nothing came of it. It wasn't really a crime because Trump had non-campaign-related reasons to keep his adultery secret.


In this case it's already been suggested that Trump may have had legitimate reason unrelated to the election to want Ukraine to investigate corruption.

My view was always that four years isn't that long. We could just sweat it out and be rid of that guy soon enough. But if Biden gets the nomination, don't bet on Trump being voted out.

They're all such horrible people.

Anyone ever see this?

I was trying to find something about this---I think it may have been somebody's student film that somehow got into distribution as an educational film.

I'm usually pro-nudity. But this was apparently made around 1970. The movie begins with a Confederate soldier played by a hippie fleeing a battle. We don't see the battle, just one guy fleeing.

In those days, we thought hippies could play anything---they could represent characters in any era before the 1890s. Jesus looked like a hippie, George Armstrong Custer had hippie-length hair. Medieval peasants probably looked like hippies. Men had pony tails in the Revolutionary War.

So, this Confederate deserter goes to a river, takes his clothes off. He was scrawny and pasty. There was full frontal nudity as he jumps into the water. When he's out of the water, some Yankees shoot him naked.

After they kill him, some Union soldiers look through his stuff and one soldier is so upset he walks away so his sergeant shoots him.

Anybody know anything about this? I don't remember the title. It was 16mm color. I googled it and found nothing.

I saw this thing twice in high school, once in a film class and once in a class called "Death & Dying". The teacher warned us there was a naked man in it. He didn't tell us it was a gross naked man. It probably would have been okay if it had been a healthy, strapping Lil Abner-like Southerner.

I know this is sexist. I wouldn't attack a naked woman's appearance this way.

Why was a hippie in a pro-Confederate movie in the first place? For that matter, why was pretty much every Hollywood movie about the Civil War pro-Confederate? Disney was the only studio that wanted to preserve the Union and end slavery.

Orson Welles on Woody Allen

Orson Welles at an earlier stage of life.

Okay, so this is a transcript of someone reading a transcript. On the last two episodes of the Thought Spiral podcast, they read excerpts from the book My Lunches with Orson. Henry Jaglom recorded conversations with Orson Welles.

“Don’t you know there’s such a thing as physical dislike? Europeans know that about other Europeans. I don’t like somebody’s looks, I don’t like them. See, I believe that it’s not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m profoundly convinced that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.”

“Orson, that’s ridiculous.”

”Measure them! Measure them! I could never stand looking at Bette Davis so I don’t want to see her act, you see. I hate Woody Allen physically. I dislike that kind of man.”

“I’ve never understood why. Have you met him?”

“Oh yes. I could hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.”

“He’s not arrogant. He’s shy.”

“He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anyone who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself but he loves himself. A very tense situation to people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest.”

“Does he take himself very seriously?”

“Very seriously. I think his movies show it. To me it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world, a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on screen is therapeutic.”

“That’s why you don’t like Fosse, either. All that Jazz.”

“Yes, that’s right. I don’t like that kind of therapeutic [unintelligible]. I’m pretty catholic in my tastes, but there are some things I can’t stand.”

“I love Woody’s movies. That we would disagree on.  We disagree on actors, too. I could never get over what you said about Brando.”

“It’s that neck. Just like a huge sausage, a shoe made of flesh.”

Henry Jaglom has his own perverse ideas about race and ethnicity. He's a devout Zionist. He became enraged that anyone would dare criticize Israel for slaughtering Jenin refugee camp.

Welles' observation that people of different races look different doesn't seem especially novel. He had a large collection of putty noses he wore in every movie so I'm sure he was very judgemental about people's appearances.

I clicked on a Henry Jaglom movie a few days ago. Turned it off a few minutes in. But the logo for his production company was a picture of Orson Welles which just seems wrong.