Proud to be an American

Donald Trump has been accusing Biden of taking drugs. My guess is that Trump thought he was fighting fire with fire by getting hopped up on Adderall before the debate. People who worked on his TV show said he would grind up Adderall and snort it like cocaine and it would turn him into an even bigger jackass than usual.

I don't know if Biden won, exactly, but Trump definitely lost. 

There was a time when they would claim that the challenger benefited from a debate because just appearing on stage with the president made them look more presidential. And that was the case here but not for the reason they were thinking.

Afterschool (2008)

 

I know it's not their fault they have to wear ties and blazers. I don't hold that against them. But I've always had mixed feelings about wealthy prep school students.

Cute but unhappy Ezra Miller is a boarder at a co-ed prep school. He watches a lot of degrading, violent porn and morbid internet videos. I averted my eyes for some of it. I don't want to see some kid fall off his bike and hit the pavement face first or Saddam Hussein's execution. Why should I be traumatized, too?

Ezra joins the AV club. He's filming something when he captures two twin girls, co-eds at the school, overcome by cocaine that turns out to have been laced with rat poison. He's of no real help to them but he appears to comfort one of them as she lay dying.

Everyone sympathizes with the poor boy who had to have been traumatized. It turns out all those videos he's been watching prepared him for it, but in a really awful way.

And he'll probably get into Princeton.

Lured, 1947, Douglas Sirk

 

I don't know. It was a little dull considering everything. 

Scotland Yard uses Lucille Ball as bait to catch a serial strangler who gets his victims through personal ads. She becomes engaged to rich guy George Sanders then begins to suspect HE's the killer. Police interrogate him and they seem convinced. He keeps confessing sarcastically which you really shouldn't do. 

Directed by Douglas Sirk. I watched it on the Criterion Channel because it ends on the 30th. Don't know where you can see it after that.

Nocturama (France, 2016)

 

Cute French teens with different ethnic backgrounds carry out a series of simultaneous bombings in Paris.  A couple of them shoot some people, too. It's not clear what their motive is. The kids, most of them, then hide out all night in a French department store. 

You know how, in Psycho, the audience presumably wanted the murderer caught, but when Anthony Perkins starts cleaning up the crime scene, viewers find themselves watching carefully hoping he doesn't miss anything? It was kind of like that here. The youngsters start trying on clothes, playing with items from the toy department and eating the food. I kept worrying they were going to get themselves caught.

I thought this might be the one French movie which, in spite of the subject matter, wouldn't make France look like a hellhole. I was wrong once again.

--SPOILER ALERT--

The movie ends with a French SWAT team moving in. According to the TV's they were watching, the French government announced that they were "enemies of the state" and there would be "no negotiations". So the police simply murder each teen as they put their hands up and try to surrender. The police look at them for a second, then shoot each one. 

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Making Time (2020)

 

I was reading a book on script writing for low budget features. The author wrote made-for-cable TV movies to be shot in 12 or 18 days, but he mentioned there were companies that made 3-day movies that were mostly unwatchable. I tried to find more information on them, so I googled "three day movie", but all I got was dozens of websites about a movie called The Next Three Days.

But I finally found a podcast interview with a fellow named Grant Pichla who made a movie in two days. He filmed 60 pages of script in one day. They had to dispense with rehearsals and, after the first scene, with pretty much any direction or discussion at all. 

The guy is a film school grad who earns at least part of his living shooting wedding videos, and was doing pretty well judging from his house in a Detroit suburb where the thing was filmed.

Turned out to be available on Amazon Prime. And it was pretty good. It looked great. The CIA wants to buy a guy's time machine, but he has to prove that it works, so he and an agent go back seven years to the night he has to propose to his estranged wife who just served him with divorce papers.

An hour and forty-eight minutes. They didn't pad it out by running the closing credits really slow. They didn't even pad out the credits with phony names like they usually do with these things. They thanked the Screen Actors Guild in the closing credits.

Magic, 1978

 

They had to change the TV ad for this movie because it was frightening children. 

 

Seems like there were a number of movies like this back then, suprisingly respectable horror/thrillers. I don't know if they existed ten years later.

 

Anthony Hopkins plays Corky, a magician and ventriloquist who becomes more and more unhinged. 

 

Hopkins is the only guest in an isolated lakeside hotel run by Ann-Margret. His agent, Burgess Meredith, arrives and finds Hopkins in a fierce argument with his dummy, Fats. When he leaves to get Hopkins psychiatric help things take a turn for the worse. Burgess Meredith, looking dignified without his wig, plays a stronger character than usual. 

  

Directed by Richard Attenborough. With Ed Lauter, David Ogden Stiers and Jerry Houser.

 

Available on HBO.

Someone else's thoughts about Diving Bell and the Butterfly

 

 

I keep seeing pandemic stuff. Things oddly analogous. People with the idea that sheltering in place or being under quarantine will be some sort of boon to them creatively or in some other way.

And here's another. I haven't seen it, but from A.S. Hamrah writing about Oscar nominees for whatever year this was:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

When I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly at BAM, in Brooklyn, it was easy to see why it resonated with the local crowd. The subject of this movie is: if only I were paralyzed from head to toe and could only move one eye, then finally I’d be able to finish that book I’ve been meaning to write.

...

Which is not to say that I didn’t like it. I did like it. For those reasons.