Color Me Blood Red, Herschel Gordon Lewis (1965)

The best line in the movie was a young man's oddly adolescent cry, "Holy bananas! It's a girl's leg!" when he and his girlfriend find a dead body buried in the sand.

A gore movie. The story of an artist who begins painting with human blood. It's something artists actually did decades later, using bodily fluids and fecal matter as artistic media. I don't know that any of their work was of lasting value since we don't know how long it would be before paintings made with that stuff would start  to disintegrate.

It was an hour and a half which was long considering how little happened in it. Unless I missed something, only two people were killed. Had a lot of terrible scenes of two young couples hanging around on the beach and of the artist being an obnoxious eccentric.

Available on the Criterion Channel if you can believe that.

The Naked Spur (1953)

I don't know who they were kidding. They kept putting the word "naked" in movie titles when there was absolutely no chance of any nudity.

The Naked Spur was a technicolor western. I never liked westerns, but looking at other movies they made back then, you can see why people went for them.

James Stewart has been hunting for Robert Ryan for whom there is a $5,000 reward. He meets an old prospector and a recently discharged cavalry officer who help catch him. Stewart is distressed about having to split the reward three ways. There are only five speaking roles.

James Stewart isn't a nice guy in it, but he's the most appealing of them. Robert Ryan and the Army guy smile way too much. I was on the Indians' side, but they effortlessly murder a large group of them. James Stewart is shot in the leg. Initially he just limps a little and gets on his horse without even slapping a bandage on it, but it wasn't completely unrealistic. He becomes delirious for a little while.

With Janet Leigh, seven years before Psycho. Robert Ryan was almost unrecognizable just two years before Bad Day at Black Rock.

I don't know what the spur or its nakedness had to do with anything.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Tread

Documentary about Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado, who thought everyone was mocking him after losing a zoning dispute. He had a muffler shop and had some skill at welding. He attacked the town in an armored bulldozer in 2004. Destroyed homes and buildings belonging to people he was mad at.

He left behind a tape recording explaining his actions. Referred to his "righteous anger".

I was surprised at how well-armed the police were in such a small town. They were no match for the giant armored bulldozer, but it was so slow-moving it was only a threat to the buildings. Although there was a .50 caliber rifle pointing out the back.

There was an old Ray Harryhausen movie where they release a circus elephant to fight a large dinosaur. It was sort of like that here. There was a big unstoppable armored bulldozer and they tried using their own bulldozer and road grader to battle it.

Available on Netflix.

Spotlight (2015)

So I watched this thing on Netflix, Spotlight, about how the Boston Globe exposed a massive child molestation scandal and cover-up by the Catholic Church.

I remember when news of this first appeared. There was a press conference on TV. I was astonished, not by the crimes themselves or the scope of the scandal, but that a Catholic who investigated it said that he hated to say it, but he would probably advise people whose children had been molested by priests to report it to the police.

After all the high brow arthouse and foreign films I try to watch, it was so nice to watch something normal in English.

According to a "visual blog" called Information is Beautiful, the film is 76% accurate. Which is pretty accurate, I guess.

With Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams.

Available on Netflix.

"Take Your Pills", Netflix documentary

Seems like EVERYBODY takes Adderall now. When the house next door to me was a rental, the college students who lived there were outside loudly talking about taking it. It was night and I could hear them inside. I went out to ask them to keep it down or go inside, but I stood and listened.

Woody Allen mentioned Adderall in his new memoir. When I took a relative to the emergency room, it was on his list of medications. Comedians Andy Kindler and Josh Weinstein talk about it on their podcast.

Everyone gets Adderall but me. I'm not sure how I feel about this. A fifteen-year-old had a heart attack taking it.

Take Your Pills is a documentary on Netflix about Adderall and other such stimulants and their widespread use. Doctors who were early advocates for its use for children now regret it.

Ritalin was first created by a chemist for his wife, Rita (hence the name), to help her lose weight and have more energy. The guy sounds like a monster.

The documentary seemed kind of middling which may be what you want in a documentary of this type. They interview a guy who was unhappy that he was forced to take it as a kid, a mother who had a photo of her son's bruised face---he would get into fights when he didn't take his Adderall. And bourgeois college students illegally buying and selling their Adderall, sometimes on public forums, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was a serious crime.

There were kids who were embarrassed that they had to take it as children. There was a clip from a movie. We see a shot of a young man asking if "any of you take Adderall and want to make fifty bucks". A reverse shot reveals that he's talking to a group of bewildered grade school boys sitting on their bikes.

Uncle Yanco (1967)

They call San Francisco "The Holy City", the "City of Love".  I never knew that, but Agnes Varda said this. She praises psychedelic art and compares night in the city to God.

I haven't been to San Francisco in thirty years. It was all right, but it was hard to find parking. I had a friend there who went to work in the tech industry after graduating from MIT. He drove us on some of the roads where the chase scene in Bullitt was filmed.

Agnes Varda goes there to see her Uncle Yanco who she never met, an artist who left France to live in Greece and then fled the military dictatorship that Lyndon Johnson imposed on the country. In the U.S., Yanco sides with the college kids opposing the Vietnam War but he isn't an activist.

I didn't care for Yanco's art. He mentions that it's expensive living there and that San Francisco is less Bohemian than it looks.

And he's not her uncle---he's her father's cousin, her first cousin once removed.

I never travel anywhere. Lately, I've comforted myself with the thought that when you travel abroad, you're going to see people who never go anywhere. You go to Paris to see Parisians in their natural state, people who don't know any better than to eat in sidewalk cafes.

I still have a role to play in world travel. If anyone comes here, they're coming to see provincials like me. To them, I'm a peasant. Even the foreign students are richer than me.

The documentary was full of hippies. I'm guessing they all came from somewhere else.

20 minutes. Available on the Criterion Channel.

Chantal Akerman, Down There

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian Zionist. She wasn't a refugee. She had her own country. But she filmed this thing mostly in an apartment in Tel Aviv. This is supposed to be some sort of meditation on Israel.

I thought it would be a good Pandemic movie. So far, it's a "slow cinema" version of Rear Window. I'm at the forty minute mark and all we've done is spy on her horrible Zionist neighbors as they walk around not caring about their crimes against humanity.