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Killers. _
A _Matrix_ fan adopted the movie's solipsism as a philosophy, decided that everything was imaginary and murdered someone. Now he's imagining that he's in prison. "No, no, you see, nothing exists outside my mind!" he probably toldthe judge.
But it can be unpredictable. Millions of people saw the trailer for _The Program, _a movie about college football players who, among other things, lie on the yellow line in the middle of a busy street at night in order to prove their courage. Some young people tried this after seeing the movie and discovered that cars drift over the center line all the time. People point to this as an example of how irresponsible filmmakers can destroy people's lives, but none of the millions of people who saw the movie or saw the scene in previews predicted this would happen. In Lincoln City, Oregon, two morons murdered a couple taking a walk on the beach. They did it because they wanted to be like Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in _In Cold Blood, _two violent morons who spent most of their lives in prison. Hickock was a child molester. They both wound up being hanged. It was grim, depressing movie. Detectives couldn't imagine anyone wanting to be like those guys. And now, another example. I watched Akira Kurosawa's _High and Low _with commentary on The Criterion Channel. It was a kidnapping story. Kurosawa made it in large part because there had been a wave of kidnappings in Japan. The victims were all children, preschoolers in some cases, and a large number of them were murdered. Kidnapping wasn't treated as a serious crime under Japanese law at the time. _High & Low _called for increasing prison sentences for thecrime.
It was an anti-kidnapping movie. So what happened? Some Japanese guy went to the movie then kidnapped a four year old off the street, murdered him and then demanded a ransom for him. Years ago, I was sitting in my car at a railroad crossing. The train had come to a stop and was just sitting there and I was in a line of cars so there was no getting out. I was listening to the radio. The technical adviser for _Breaking Bad_ was on. They asked if she was worried that she was showing people how to set up a meth lab. She said it didn't matter----no one would ever be stupid enough to imitate such a grimly violent TV show. I didn't have her faith. One time, at work, I was marveling that _Battle Royale,_ a Japanese movie so shocking it was unavailable in the U.S. for years, was directed by an old guy. He had a long liste of credits including _Tora Tora Tora_ and _Message from Space._ A co-worker told me about his dim-witted friend who said he'd LOVE to have been forced to fight to the death with all his classmates in high school. Posted by Waldo Scott at 7:19 AMNo comments:
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WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019 THE BRIDGE, GERMANY, 1959 I'd heard about this movie years ago, the first major West German anti-war movie. A little surprising that it took them until 1959 to decide that World War Two was bad. A small group of enthusiastic Nazi 16-year-olds are drafted into the Nazi army. They've only been in the Army a day. So when the troops are all sent into combat they're given an easy job "guarding" a bridge that the Germans intend to blow up anyway. When American tanks appear, the Nazi teens actually do pretty well. Instead of being immediately wiped out, they blow up a couple of tanks and kill quite a few Americans. It didn't make war seem that awful. If a group of 16-year-olds with no training can successfully defend a bridge, think of what they could do if they completed basic training. _Saving Private Ryan_ made war look way worse, and it was pro-war. Available on the Criterion Channel. Posted by Waldo Scott at 11:11 PMNo comments:
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MOVIES I DON'T LIKE
I sat through _Midnight Run_ again. I don't know how many times I've seen it. I guess I half liked it the first time I saw it and I've liked it less and less with each subsequent viewing. Bounty hunters have appeared in movies for decades, always as villains. Didn't find any of it funny. Just a middling 1980's "action" "comedy". My mother and sister-in-law insisted on watching it even though it had a nearly all-male cast. In a discussion of other movies everyone liked but me, I was surprised that I was the only one who thought that _An American President_ was a morbid romantic fantasy about Bill Clinton with Hillary dead. My mother keeps watching _Absolute Power_, made by Republican Clint Eastwood. I keep telling her it was intended as an attack on Bill Clinton but she doesn't care. Eastwood was forty when he was a member of "Young Celebrities for Nixon". The other young "celebrities" were the head of the Young Republicans and a former Miss America. I shouldn't complain, though. I'm sitting here now with a terrible B western playing on the Roku. They're just terrible. Even the people who made them thought so. I keep turning them on because I don't feel I have to pay attention. I'm not going to miss any brilliant plot point or anything else I want to see. In this one, a criminal becomes a Texas Ranger to prove that his murdered Texas Ranger brother wasn't corrupt. He saves a woman herding sheep from drowning, then saves her from her abusive father who intends to flog her with some sort of whip sheep herders apparently use in order to punish her for nearly drowning. Posted by Waldo Scott at 2:15 PMNo
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MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019 KEVIN SPACY BACK IN ACTION_ Indiewire
_ reports
that Kevin Spacey has re-emerged in a "bizarre" poetry reading inRome:
> Kevin Spacey has once > again emerged under puzzling circumstances. The embattled former > “House of Cards” star and Oscar winner, who fell from grace in > 2017 after sexual assault allegations against the “American > Beauty” actor surfaced, made a strange public appearance in Rome > over the weekend. Spacey surprised museum-goers when he set up shop > at the Palazzo Massimo to perform a public poetry reading. > The poem, “The Boxer” by Gabriele Tinti, centers on a dejected > fighter who bemoans his cruel fate while bleeding out by the > ringside. “The more you’re wounded, the greater you are. And the > more empty you are,” recounts Spacey, clad in a burnt-sienna suit, > to a nonplussed crowd. This is no doubt yet another autobiographical > flourish from the disgraced 60-year-old actor, who resurfaced last > October in an unsettling video>
> posing as axed “House of Cards” character Frank Underwood, where > he used Underwood’s Shakespearean oratory to denounce the sexual > assault claims that began with “Star Trek: Discovery” actor > Anthony Rapp. (TMZ has the video of his latest public appearance> here
> .
In the McCarthy era, some low budget producers took advantage of blacklisted talent. I just wrote about the movie _Robot Monster, _a terribly cheap horror movie with blacklisted actor Selena Royle and music by greylisted composer Elmer Bernstein. Sadly, I don't think you're going to see Kevin Spacey or Louie CK doing low budget horror movies now. Although, now that I think about it, Andy Dick was down to nothing but ultra-cheap movies, but it looks like even they'll stop hiring him. The #metoo movement may not be a boon to low budget cinema after all. Of course, I'm probably the only one who ever suggested it would be. Posted by Waldo Scott at 3:39 PMNo comments:
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SUNDAY, AUGUST 4, 2019 TWO MASS SHOOTINGS IN ONE DAY I don't know about Ohio, but Texas' "open carry" laws didn't do them any good in El Paso. There were two mass shootings one one day, one in Dayton, Ohio, one El Paso, Texas. I've seen big stupid-looking morons walking around supermarkets with guns. I'm sure they think shoppers look at them as heroes and not bigdumb louts.
Posted by Waldo Scott at 9:53 AMNo comments:
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KEN LOACH'S BLACK JACK (1979) I think the only other Ken Loach film I've seen is Kes, so this movie surprised me. Set in 1750 in England, about 12-year-old boy named Tolly who is forced to go on the run with a huge French criminal called Black Jack. Tolly is rather calm about it. He rescues a girl his age who's being transported to a lunatic asylum, they escape from Black Jack and join a medicine show. There's blackmail, body snatching, child labor, traveling performers. Tolly wants to go to sea even though he's twelve. I'll tell you one thing that surprised me: that everyone was fully literate. Tolly reads about mental illness in a medical book, another kid takes a quick look the insane asylum ledger and finds the information he needs, they write letters. This was made a half million pounds. Reportedly, Loach had been working a lot in television at the time but heard he could get funding to make a children's movie. The story revolved around three twelve-year-olds---Tolly and the girl, Belle, and this awful kid who really does pretty well for himself as a blackmailer. The kids were non-professional actors and had no other acting credits on imdb. The outdoor scenes were shot in 16mm, the interiors in 35mm. The sound mix was done in a weekend. The non actors were very natural. In one scene, Tolly rubs his eye for a second as he talks to another character. A trained actor would have waited and a lesser director would have done a retake. Available in The Criterion Channel. Posted by Waldo Scott at 8:39 AMNo comments:
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SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 2019 SUNDANCE TV SERIES ON KEN MCELROY, SKIDMORE, MISSOURI There's a six part Sundance TV series called _No One Saw a Thing_ about the murder of Ken McElroy in the small farming town of Skidmore, Missouri. McElroy terrorized the place for years, shot at least two people. He was about to be sentenced for the last attempted murder. He had a lot of money, apparently from stealing from other farms and stealing and selling antiques but he had a very good lawyer who kept him out of prison. As I recall, a large group of people in town were going to go see him get sentenced, but his lawyer got it delayed. McElroy drove into town. Bought beer. Was smirking at the helpless rage of the people who thought they were going to see him put away. He got into his truck with his daughter and was shot a couple of times with two different rifles. No one in town would admit seeing who did it. As I recall, McElroy was suspected of committing at least one murder and a couple of arsons. I guess once they killed him, the town felt free to act. McElroy's widow filed a lawsuit against the town so they burned her house down and she and her horrible children fled. I always thought it was good riddance. To hell with him. There was already a TV miniseries or docudrama about the case, it was reported on _60 Minutes _and _Frontline_ and I heard that the Patrick Swayze movie _Roadhouse_ was vaguely inspired by it. Rick Schmidt's book _Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices_ includes an outline for a movie he never made based on the case. It was about how Ken McElroy's poor self-esteem drives him to criminality and how the townspeople, after they kill him, must contemplate their own responsibility for not being nicer to him. Schmidt's idea sounded terrible and it couldn't be filmed on 16mm for$6,000.
I tried to come up with my own ideas. One was to do something _Roshomon_-like, or _Chan is Missing_-like---have a couple of detectives or reporters go back a few years later and talk to people. I don't know if that would have been any good, either. My other idea was, the guy who everyone knows killed McElroy returns to town after getting out of treatment for alcoholism. He finds he alienated most of the town during his time as town drunk and a few people, like his soon-to-be-ex-wife, have reason to be especially mad at him. He's afraid they'll report him for the murder, so he starts peeling them off one by one. Posted by Waldo Scott at 12:29 PMNo comments:
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