Christopher Forbes again

Parker Stevenson, TV's Frank Hardy, as General Sherman.

I don't know what's wrong with me. Watched another Christopher Forbes movie. The poor guy is truly the worst filmmaker ever. But, no, I haven't seen the work of every filmmaker ever. I have no idea who the worst is.

I stumbled on this (positive) review of one of his movies:

A coherent script — never a certainty in a Forbes’ film — sure helps. So do solid performances from his leads, Heather Clark and Tripp Courtney.

So does cohesive direction from Forbes, who avoids the pointless tangents that mar so many of his other films.

The tiny budget shows — from aging, overweight actors to Civil War battle scenes that include no more than a handful of soldiers.   

I've tended to be in favor of old and overweight actors but I'm starting to have my doubts. I think Forbes uses Civil War reenactors as actors. 

The critic in this case was reviewing The Confederate about a young woman in drag who joins the traitorous Confederate Army. I've heard there were a number of women who did this in the Civil War. Displays of nudity must not have been part of military service in those days.

Forbes has made up to five movies a year since 2005, forty-six total. If he could just make sense. 

Sinead O'Connor, RIP

I don't listen to music and knew little about Sinead O'Connor. 

She died today at age 56.

She converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her name to Shuhada' Sadaqat, but she continued to use her Sinead O'Connor as a stage name.

I was watching Saturday Night Live the night she tore up the picture of Pope John-Paul II. I thought nothing of it and was surprised that so many people got whatever religious undergarment they wore in such a bunch over it.

I don't remember how they phrased it, but the Catholic Church put out a statement comparing it to voodoo, that tearing up a picture was something like sticking a pin in a doll.

Of course, that cuts both ways. Why were idolatrous Catholics so protective of a graven image? 

That was in 1992. In 2017, I posted this:

Okay, so one time, Sinead O'Connor, who was abused as a teenager in a "Magdalene Asylum", tore up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live. David Spade reported in his memoir that he picked up a piece of the picture as a keepsake. But, he said, he was later called into an office by network security who wanted it back. Someone on the crew had apparently picked up the remaining pieces and sold them to Inside Edition which pasted the picture back together minus Spade's piece and showed it on TV.

So how was it that Joe Pesci appeared on the show the next week and claimed in his monologue that he had demanded that the picture be pasted back together? He held it up to the audience and showed it to them, it missing a corner piece. It was Inside Edition that pasted it together and it had nothing to do with him.

Pesci later appeared on David Letterman's show and repeated the story, again bearing false witness....

Joe Pesci violating the eight commandment was kind of beside the point, but it was years after the event and I had just heard an interview with David Spade promoting his book.

Here's a better article by Gary Leupp from 2010:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2010/03/22/fight-the-real-enemy/
 

Spacey wins

The Kevin Spacey legal juggernaut has won again. Acquitted of all charges.

He went to Britain voluntarily to stand trial. He would have looked like an idiot if he were convicted.

Kevin Spacey sweating it out

The jury's still out in the Kevin Spacey trial. The charges against him carry a possible life sentence. 

Will the British jury associate Spacey with their country's own celebrities who got away with horrible sex crimes for decades, or will he seem pretty harmless by comparison? Will they resent a foreigner coming to their country and groping their "blokes", or will their natural servility to the upper classes kick in? And what about Spacey's failure to keep a stiff upper lip?

"Blubbing on the wi'ness stand, 'e was!"

We'll see what they decide. Spacey must have thought his chances were pretty good. He went there to stand trial voluntarily.

Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (Mark L Lester, 1976)

An early Mark L. Lester effort.

Stars Marjoe Gortner and Lynda Carter. Half Bonnie & Clyde, half Aloha Bobby and Rose and half something else. Has a reference to Deliverance. Marjoe makes a pudgy vigilante squeal like a pig.

Marjoe smiles too much. He shows some concern when he first kills a man, but being a wanted murderer doesn't bother him as much as it might have.

Marjoe Gortner had been a child evangelist, ordained at age four. A young couple made a mockery of their own wedding at that time by having him conduct the ceremony. When he was about 20, he got a film crew to record his last tour on the revival circuit revealing its seedy underbelly. The film, Marjoe, won an Oscar for best documentary.  He was somehow able to parlay this in an acting career. His hyper-religious background made me wonder how he felt about doing the sex scenes with Lynda Carter, TV's Wonder Woman.

I'm giving away the ending here but I don't think it matters. It ends with Lynda Carter spitting in the sheriff's face and calling him a bastard because the cops killed her spree-killer boyfriend who she only met a few days earlier. They killed him in a gunfight. But the cops also killed her sister and one of her pre-crime spree girlfriends, but who should she blame for that.

Free on Pluto.

Tony Bennett, RIP

Tony Bennett died this morning at age 96.

From his obituary in the New York Times: 

Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, and, along with Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, performed at the Stars for Freedom rally on the City of St. Jude campus on the outskirts of Montgomery on March 24, the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address that came to be known as the “How Long? Not Long” speech. At the conclusion of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove Mr. Bennett to the airport; she was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan. 

New bit of information in Sam Bankman-Fried case

From counterpunch.com:

...one of the lawsuits emerging from the bankruptcy of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX discloses that company executives planned to buy the island of Nauru, which they planned to escape to in the event of a global calamity: “In the event that half or more of the global population perished, the island would then be used to ensure the survival of members of the effective altruism movement.”