Sue Lyon, 73, RIP

I saw Lolita (1962) in high school. They showed the Stanley Kubrick movie at the university. Two women sat behind me whispering loudly about what a pig Humbert Humbert was. Humbert's character seemed more likable than he should have been, so they weren't necessarily stating the obvious.

Sue Lyon has died at 73. Lolita was her first movie role. Her only roles before that were in episodes of Dennis the Menace and The Loretta Young Show. She had almost no experience and held her own against James Mason and Shelley Winters.

Lyon's second movie was Night of the Iguana. She appeared in several decent movies in the '60's but her career went downhill in the '70's. Her last credit was a 1980 monster movie called Alligator. Her career lasted eighteen years.

Christmas is over

Christmas is done. I got three presents, all of them books, one I already owned and one was an affront to my politics. My mother didn't get me anything, but I told her not to and I did all her Christmas shopping so how could she? I was supposed to have the week off except for Monday, but I worked Christmas Eve and Thursday which was okay.

Christmas dinner wasn't very good. I don't know how this came up, but my brother-in-law became weirdly enraged when I said that most lawyers were Republicans. He demanded to know my basis for that. I told him that, when conservatives complained that universities were run by liberals, it was pointed out that law schools, medical schools and business schools were predominately Republican. He denied that doctors skewed Republican, too. I don't know why he was so angry about it and he kept arguing. At least he didn't accuse me of anti-Semitism this time.

I watched My Night at Maud's and started watching another French movie about a dysfunctional family at Xmas. I watched a few minutes of a black & white Christmas episode of The Beverly Hillbillies and maybe five seconds of the girls on The Facts of Life singing a Christmas carol.

This Christmas was a massive loss. Spent over $500 and got three books in return. I could have bought a pretty good car for what this thing cost me.

Brian De Palma's Domino (2019)

Remember on Miami Vice when Don Johnson sleeps with a woman who swipes his gun when he goes back to work and he doesn't notice that his holster is two pounds lighter until he's in a gunfight and finds he has to use his back-up gun? Then he goes back to get his gun and tells her, "That was a major un-cool, baby."

Cops really do carry "back-up guns", but usually they're to plant on unarmed people they've killed. I remember a case where an exceptionally thrifty cop used a cap gun for this purpose. He wasn't charged with any crime, but they fired him thus enraging the police union.

Paul Schrader attacked Brian De Palma, and it seems like someone else said something rude about him, so I turned on Brian De Palma's terrorism movie, Domino, which was listed as one of the ten worst movies of the year. Set in Denmark. Starring a guy with a Polish-looking name.

The movie begins with a Danish cop hurrying to work and forgetting his gun. This gets his partner killed by a terrorist, then they steal a scene from Veritgo.

The movie is in English. They distinguish the Americans from the Danes by having the CIA agents act obnoxious and speak in vaguely Southwestern accents.

At no time in history have Europeans had any real qualms about killing people, but their cops have different approaches to carrying guns. In Diva (France, 1981) the police chief borrows the detective's gun because he did bring his. Carlos the Jackal escaped arrest at one point because the cops came to his apartment on their way home from work and weren't armed. In Insomnia (Norway, 1997) the Norwegian police comment on how the Swedish police carry their guns all the time. In the Swedish detective series Wallander, someone lectures Kurt Wallander that shooting people is a requirement of the job.

De Palma stole that other Alfred Hitchcock thing. Vertigo was set in San Francisco, so the opening shot is of a cable car, Hitchcock's movie about spies in Holland had their secret headquarters in a windmill. In North by Northwest, they have the UN building in New York, big giant cornfields in the midwest and it ends at Mt Rushmore.

In this movie, they drive through Holland stop in front of a big windmill and it ends in a bullfighting arena in Spain.

It wasn't terrible but it wasn't very interesting.

Something from The Onion

In case there's any doubt, yes, I know, The Onion isn't real.

My failure in life hasn't bothered me that much. Deep down, I always knew this is how I'd end up. But I've always wondered how people feel when their movies turn out really bad. I look at movies and imagine the heartbroken families of the actors.

The child actor who starred in Troll 2 thought he was well on his way to success having starred in a feature film. Then his parents gave him a videotape of the movie for Christmas. He put it in the VCR and his dreams of success evaporated.

On the other hand, my sister-in-law appeared in a bad horror movie. She knew it was awful, but she didn't care. She got paid and she was thankful she got killed off in the first ten minutes so her friends could see her and turn it off.

I'm a little apprehensive how another movie she appeared in will turn out. She was much happier with it. It was made by some recent film school grads, but it's still in post production.

And here, from The Onion:

LOS ANGELES—Stunned into silence after reading through thousands of highly critical comments about the new film, James Darnell, the CG supervisor for Cats, spoke up quietly Thursday to note that he thought he actually did an okay job. “Honestly, I think the end result didn’t turn out so bad at all,” said Darnell, stressing that the widely panned sight of Taylor Swift, Jason Derulo, and James Corden as computer-generated cats singing and dancing through London alleyways represented three grueling years of his life. “For months, I stayed up late rendering textures to make sure the whiskers looked just right on the face of [Idris Elba’s character] Macavity. That was hard, all right? And when I was finally finished, I was so proud that I showed my wife some of the concept art. I don’t know. Obviously, it’s a silly little thing, but—I mean, Jesus Christ, this is my life these people are tearing apart. Have some fucking decency.” At press time, Darnell speculated that maybe the problem had less to do with him and more to do with the fact that Americans have just gotten far crueler and more spiteful in the past few years.

My Night at Maud's (1969)

You know people who say they're "spiritual" but not religious? Back in those days, people tended to be religious but not spiritual.

My Night at Maud's is about a devout Catholic who hangs around with his Marxist friend and his atheist friend Maud. They sit in her apartment and have a long conversation about life and love.


One thing they always make fun of on Mystery Science Theater 3000 is scenes of people traveling by car. They think you should just cut to where ever it is they were going. The audience will figure out that that they drove there.

That didn't work in one movie, The Detective with Frank Sinatra in the title role. I had no idea how his character got anywhere. Did he drive himself? How was he at finding his way around and coping with traffic? And what was the parking situation in New York?

One of Eric Rohmer's trademarks was he would show people driving. With this movie, so much of it was long conversations in a couple of apartments, showing the guy driving really helped. It gave it a sense of location. If it were just scenes in people's apartments, they might have filmed it anywhere.

Rohmer's known for long conversations in his movies, but they did get out of the house more than I'm letting on. The movie even had weather in it. It was snowing. I watched it because it was a Christmas movie.


They talked philosophy at one point. They talked about Pascal's wager. I googled it. Part of it was, Pascal argued that it doesn't cost you anything to believe in God, on the off chance that God does exist, you could get eternal life out of the deal, so you may as well be a believer. He doesn't mention tithing or church-going. And the movie goes on to show that religious belief can have a negative affect on your life.

But it dawned on me that that I should start buying lottery tickets again. If I don't win, the cost of losing is minimal and if I win it would be really, really great. There are people who dismiss lottery players as mathematically inept, but Pascal had a formula for it.

I don't know what this stuff means, but it looks mathematical.

Of course, the Catholic guy in the movie said he didn't like Pascal's thing for this reason, talking about religious belief like he was playing the lottery. I don't know that religious belief is entirely voluntary anyway. You can't make yourself believe or completely drive it out of your head if you were ever a believer.

The Marxist guy, by the way, related it to a quote from Lenin about the Russian Revolution.


It was a horrible, horrible time. Even Marxist college professors wore suits and ties just to hang around with their friends. They make the Catholic guy out to be some kind of prude because he won't lie in bed with Maud, but I don't think I would either wearing a suit. In America, there were public service announcements warning people not to smoke in bed, something the French were apparently oblivious to. They didn't wear seat belts and at one point the guy was driving in the snow like it was dry pavement.

Another masked singer

I don't keep up with this at all, but it seems there's another one of those singing shows on TV, but on this one, the singers wear masks.

David Soul did this years ago on the Merv Griffin show. He said that he did it because he wanted people to judge his singing on its own merits, not because he was really, really good-looking. At least he didn't do it out of false modesty.

This is the price one pays for being good-looking. You forget and say things that make you sound like a jerk. Teen Joseph Gordon-Levitt told a reporter that he wanted his band to be judged for their music, not for being adorable.

I don't know if Finn Wolfhard has managed to avoid this pitfall.

Buffalo Boys (2018)

I saw this on a list of worst movies of the year, but articles like that are always stupid. How could anyone know what the best or worst movies are? In this case, it's a Singaporean-Indonesian co-production. How do you judge without taking into account cultural differences? I doubt it could have been successful in the West without failing in the East.

It was an anti-colonialist martial arts western. They corrected all the things I keep complaining about in westerns. They used far more interesting locations, they were anti-colonialist which is pretty much the opposite of American westerns. The actors were better-looking. I always hated the fist fights in American westerns. But long martial arts battles don't seem plausible, they might have toned down the torture and executions and the storyline could have had a bit more structure to it.



I'll never be satisfied. Probably because I never liked westerns in the first place. There were so many of them on TV when I was a kid, and there were all the movies, and I never saw their appeal. I find myself weirdly drawn to them now, but what do I want from them?