Retired. Disabled Veteran. Democrat. Cancer Survivor. Stroke Survivor. Radical. Socialist. Non-theist. Political Activist. Witty Impromptu Comedian. Writer. Professional Pain in the Ass. Class Warrior.
And Smart-Mouth Dispenser of Political Snark.
About Me
Farnsworth68
The Left Coast, United States
Farnsworth is a disabled Vietnam Veteran with a bad attitude and too much time on his hands.
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What Breed of Liberal I Am
My Liberal Identity:
You are a New Left Hipster, also known as a MoveOn.org liberal, Netroots activist, or Daily Show fanatic. You believe that if we really want to defend American values, conservative hatriots must be exposed and mocked for every fanatical, puritanical, soulless, paranoid, fact-free, obstructionist ideal for which they stand.
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
-- Henry Kissinger
"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist."
-- Archbishop Helder Camara
"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-- Voltaire
"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."
-- Malcolm X
"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."
-- Eric Hoffer
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.... We need believing people."
-- Adolph Hitler
"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him."
-- President John F. Kennedy
"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."
-- Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine, 1615, during the trial of Galileo
"Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely-powerful infinitely-knowledgeable universe-spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life."
-- Andrew Lias
"When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life."
-- Sigmund Freud
"All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance."
-- Samuel Johnson
"Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither and will lose both."
-- Benjamin Franklin
"It is in no way lawful to demand, to defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, or speech, of writing, or of religion, as if they were so many rights that nature has given to man."
-- Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846)
"There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts of tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us."
This week I am proud to present 1978's Rockers, a semi-documentary look at the old-school Jamaican roots reggae culture.
Trailer:
This film, loosely based on that masterpiece of Italian neo-realism, Bicycle Thieves, shows a slice of daily life of the Rastafarian roots reggae culture, featuring many actual reggae musicians and a score that includes many of the greats: Peter Tosh, Gregory Isaacs, Burning Spear. The soundtrack alone is worth the price of admission.
I first saw this at a local college film festival circa 1980 and was blown away by it. Then it disappeared, but thanks to the DVD revolution it's available on DVD from Netlix.
If you watch it, it's best to brush up on your Rasta/Patois-English first. Even though it is subtitled in more-or-less standard English, some things will still remain a mystery.
I wanted to include a video of Peter Tosh singing my favorite cut from the soundtrack, Steppin' Razor, but for some vague copyright reason, YouTube won't allow it to be embedded on any other websites, so you can see it here.
I am happy to present the Orson Welles 1958 masterpiece, Touch of Evil. This movie is widely considered to one of the last -- and best -- examples of Hollywood's classic film noir era.
Trailer:
It was also widely considered to be a dud, another misstep in a career filled with them, but over the years it has gained in stature. This despite the worse-than-horrible miscasting of Charlton Heston as a Mexican(!) detective in a border town. Supposedly the studio forced Heston on Welles and basically said, "deal with it". So he did.
The opening scene is famous for its opening take "long take" using a movable crane to follow a car from the time a bomb is placed in its trunk until after cruising through the streets of the border town, it crosses the US border and explodes. Reputedly Welles used up fully half of his filming budget on just this one shot:
That is, of all places, Venice California masquerading as the border town of Los Robles in this movie. Orson Welles is outstanding, even in the fake nose, as corrupt sheriff Hank Quinlan, and watch for some surprising minor-character near-cameos of Marlene Dietrich, Mercedes McCambridge and Dennis Weaver. If you watch that "long take" carefully, you'll also see an Alfred Hitchcock-like appearance of Welles himself crossing in front of the car as it is stopped at a light on the street.
In many ways it is Orson Welles' most personal film. He's played a lot characters who were destroyed by their own hubris (Charles Foster Kane, MacBeth, Othello, for example), and Hank Quinlan is no exception, but you can't help but see echoes of Welles and the studio system he fought for so many years in the machinations of Quinlan's desire to get the conviction, no matter what, thanks to that little "touch of evil" that everyone carries with them...
I can't praise this movie enough. I loved it so much that I even bought my own copy of the DVD, and I hardly ever do that. Highly recommended.
This week's must-see cinema is a fairly new one, Rosewater from 2014, directed by The Daily Show's Jon Stewart in his directorial debut.
Trailer:
This is a terrific movie, especially the psychological torture scenes rendered in unbelievable verisimilitude. It concerns the story of an Iranian-Canadian film journalist who goes on a brief trip back to Iran to cover the 1999 presidential election and finds himself caught up in a strange and mysterious web of suspicion that rivals something out of Kafka.
It was filmed in Jordan, with some second-unit shots of events in Tehran. and features the real life story of Maziar Bahari, whose 2011 book describing his nightmare, Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival , describes the 118 days he was kept in solitary confinement and underwent some brutal psychological torture at the hands of a guy called "Rosewater" -- hence the title.
It is definitely not a comedy -- although there is some humor in it, in the interrogations by Rosewater and Bahari's response to certain questions, and a brief appearance by The Daily Show's Jason Jones, recreating a scene from a location shot in Iran that is used against Bahari. It is a surprising and enjoyable first outing from a director who could have a whole new career ahead of him when he quits The Daily Show later this year.
Although it didn't originate in the United States, the chain gang became an almost uniquely American feature of "justice" after the Civil War. When it was finally clear that The South didn't have slaves any more to do all the shit work, they created a "new
slavery" in the form of shackled-together black men (mostly), convicted of "crimes" and forced to "pay their debt to society" by working on farms, roadways, public lands, etc. It had been phased out by 1955, but in 1995 it was revived.
In 1999 filmmaker Xackery Irving made an award-winning documentary on the revival of the chain gang in America, both in Alabama and in Maricopa County, Arizona (home of the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio) which features the first all-female chain gang.
Trailer:
This is a chilling look at the revival of the chain gang system of punishment and retribution -- there's no other way to describe it, since it certainly doesn't qualify as rehabilitation of any kind.
We get to know a few prisoners and guards during the course of the film. The guards seem to think that the prisoners under their supervision are being "rehabilitated", and even the prisoners agree in general, saying that they don't want to come back to prison when they get out, that they are "cured". But as we learn at the end of the film, a depressingly high number of the inmates, who were followed up by the filmmakers after filming stopped, were back in the system in one way or another. Or dead.
This is a depressing look at a slice of the prison system in this country, and it's not a pretty sight. There's no violence on screen, but it is talked about a lot, both by the inmates and the guards, and the guards seem perfectly willing to kill a prisoner who tries to walk away. It's not clearly stated, but a couple of the guards seem a little too eager to do it if they get the chance.
Not an uplifting film, but one that is definitely worth watching.
In 1931 director Todd Browning, fresh off his successful screen adaptation of Dracula, who had previously bought the rights to a short story by Tod Robbins called Spurs, started filming what has been called a "subgenre of one" semi-horror film, now considered a cult classic, entitled Freaks.
Trailer:
Browning went out of his way to cast actual circus sideshow performers with real deformities in this movie, including the famous conjoined (aka "Siamese") twins, the Hilton Sisters, legless Johnny Eck, the "Human Torso" Prince Randian and many others. In an unusual move, Browning did not try to exploit the performers. Instead they are presented as fully human, with all the wants and needs and fears of the fully functional. It's the "normals" who come off as monsters here.
The film was incredibly controversial, not only for its subject matter but also for the shocking display of so many "freaks" on the screen. After an initial screening, MGM demanded many cuts before it would okay its distribution. And this was in pre-code Hollywood, even before the Hays Office and the Motion Picture Code.
In all the studio demanded -- and got -- nearly half an hour of scenes deemed too "shocking" deleted from the movie, including the fate of strongman Hercules (in the cut scenes he is castrated by the angry "freaks" in the climactic scene from the movie and we later see him singing ... as a soprano!). The final version, which is all we can watch now, is a kind of choppy and awkward affair that would have benefited from the more detailed exposition. The cut scenes are considered to be lost forever. The studio also tagged on a new happy-ish ending.
Browning's career never quite recovered from Freaks. The movie was banned outright in England, and was hardly shown in the United States until the rediscovery of the "cult film" by the counterculture in the late 1960s. It was shown extensively as a "midnight movie" throughout the 70s and 80s, and those of us who had read about it for years finally got to see it.
Taglines: Can a full grown woman truly love a MIDGET? "We'll Make Her One of Us!" from the gibbering mouths of these weird creatures came this frenzied cry... no wonder she cringed in horror... this beautiful woman who dared toy with the love of one of them! The Strangest... The Most Startling Human Story Ever Screened... Are You Afraid To Believe What Your Eyes See? The Love Story of a SIREN, a GIANT, and a DWARF! (As you can see, the taglines were far more exploitative than the film itself.)
Filmmaker Orlando de Guzman, a native of The Philippines, grew up with a folk saying that "it's better to be with seven devils than one policeman". He went to Ferguson MO in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting, and found that saying still holds true for the black people in and around St. Louis -- this stunning, shocking, eye-opening film is the result of that journey.
While this technically is not true "cinema", it deserves to be seen, near and far, by as many people as possible.
Too bad the people who really need to see it likely won't watch it...
This week's must-see cinema feature is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre from 1948, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt and Bruce Bennett.
Trailer:
This happens to be one of my very favorite movies of all time. It was based on a 1927 book of the same name (terrific book as well) by the odd mystery-man of American letters B. Traven, and has the dubious distinction of being the likely source for the well-known phrase from the late 60s and early 70s, "don't Bogart that joint". In a famous scene from the movie, one that used to be routinely edited out for television, Bogart and Walter Huston are sharing a "peace pipe" (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) with a bunch of Indios and Bogart says something to the effect of "Why are we passing this around? Why doesn't everybody just have his own?"
Etymology sites will inform you, pedantically, that the phrase comes from Bogart's habit of holding a cigarette between his lips, but I think that it too general, and that the most reliable theory stems from this scene in this movie.
Anyway, the film centers on a group of ne'er-do-well hangers on, barely existing on the scrappy edges of expat life in Mexico, who luck out and find gold -- a lot of gold -- in the mountains. Fred C. Dobbs, the Bogart character, representing Mister Average Man, allows his lust for gold to color his reality, with tragic results which were predicted by The Old Man.
The name Fred C. Dobbs kind of took on a life of its own after the release of this movie, to the point where it made an appearance as the name of a character in, of all things, the television series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and M*A*S*H.
Other references to the movie occur regularly, featuring the famous line, "I don't got to show you no stinking badges!" Even if you've never even heard of this movie, you will recognize that line.
Directed by Walter Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart and Huston's own father, John Huston. Huston fils won two Academy Awards (Directing and Adaptation) and Huston père won Best Supporting Actor. The film was nominated for Best Picture but lost to Hamlet. Old B. Traven himself, in disguise as his agent Hal Croves, was present for most of the filming.
Watch for a young Robert Blake as the kid who sells Bogart a lottery ticket early in the movie, and a cameo by John Huston himself as the rich American in the white suit that Bogart keeps begging money from in the town square.
By now you've probably heard of the HBO documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief that premiered last week. If you haven't watched it, track it down and see it. If you don't have HBO at home already, this is the best reason to get it. If not, you can wait until Netflix gets it at some undetermined date in the future -- at least you can put it into your "I Want This When It Is Released" queue.
Trailer:
This film does a complete exposé on the cult that is Scientology, based on interviews with a number of high-level defectors, showing how founder L. Ron Hubbard -- significantly a science-fiction writer -- cobbled together his weird system of belief out of his own paranoia, and was able to seduce a huge number of people -- mostly disaffected youth at the beginning -- into joining his secret brotherhood. It also explains how Scientology was able to convince the IRS that it was really a church, and thereby protect its over one billion dollars -- yes, over ONE BILLION -- in assets from being taxed.
As you would expect, the famous Scientologists are covered -- Tom Cruise and John Travolta especially, who are the celebrity faces of Scientology. The movie goes into some detail as to why they still remain in the cult and why they appear to have accepted and condoned the abuses of Scientology leaders of other members.
It's an enlightening and scary look into the inner workings of Scientology, and enough to piss you off that so many people can be taken in by simple brainwashing techniques applied to them expertly by their "auditors". These secrets are exposed by actual former cult members, many of them high-level, who came out and who are not afraid to speak out despite the many threats and legal actions the cult is willing to take towards them.
The one thing that they all feel -- and this is common among former members of any cult -- is how embarrassed they are by their former lives in the cult.
Not for the faint of heart, but still a must-see documentary.
Back in January I wrote a piece entitled Who Killed Gary Webb?, reviewing the book Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, by Nick Shou. It was all about the California journalist who blew open the CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine connection, and who, for his trouble, was rewarded with having his career ruined and his life ended abruptly.
I mentioned then that it had been made into a movie, but I hadn't see it. Now I have.
Trailer:
It's a highly credible account of Gary Webb and the ways in which he was destroyed for daring to expose the crimes of the US government. Of course the film can't go into the detail that was in the book, but it does a good job of presenting the top-level events and actions.
You'll see a lot of familiar faces here, including Academy Award winner Jeremy Renner as Webb, and the inimitable Michael K. Williams as "Freeway" Rick Ross.
You can get it from Netflix, who seemed to take their own sweet time in getting it out. But never mind that, it's here and available and definitely worth watching.
Being a known -- and convicted -- cinephile, I'm a big fan of film technique. One of the techniques that I quite like is the "long take", wherein the camera keeps rolling through a lengthy shot, usually along with extensive camera movement. Think of the opening scene in Orson Welles' classic crime-noirTouch of Evil, where we start with a closeup of a bomb being planted in the trunk of a car, then follow that car with a crane shot as it drives a considerable distance through a Mexican border town, and finally explodes on the other side of the border.
Many films over the years have used this technique to great effect, arguably the most ambitious of which was Alfred Hitchcock'sRope from 1948, which tried to appear that it was all one long take. Because of the physical limitations of film, the longest take in the movie was about 10 minutes, before the camera ran out of film. Hitchcock "cheated" his way past this by having the camera blocked by a man's coat as it was about to run out of film, so the film looks as though it was just one long shot. It doesn't quite work, but it is interesting to watch.
Then came the advent of digital video equipment, which meant that you were not going to run out of film, and the length of an individual shot was limited only by the size of your hard drive.
Today's Must-See Cinema selection is Russian Ark, which is kind of the apotheosis of the long take: The whole movie, 96 minutes, is one long unedited shot.
Trailer:
An unnamed narrator wanders through the famed Winter Palace, one-time home of the czars and now the Hermitage Museum, in Leningrad St. Petersburg. As he passes through 33 rooms in the palace, he wanders into, in no particular order, set pieces of Russian history. They range from a homely view of Nicholas, the last czar, and his family enjoying a private meal, to Catherine-the-Great fancy dress balls with hundreds of participants. The whole movie had a cast of over 2,000 people, and pretty much all of them had to hit their marks and get it perfect. After all, it was one continuous shot.
I can't sing the praises of this filmmaker, Alexander Sokurov, enough. He had only three tries to get it right, since the Russian authorities gave him an extremely limited amount of time to complete filming. The sheer audacity of this attempt pays off big time in the end, a visually stunning and mesmerizing tableau of over 200 years of Russian history. Don't try to make a lot of sense of it while you are watching it. Just flow with it. You can -- and will -- think about it later, after it is over.
This is one of my favorite foreign films of all time.
You can watch it streaming from Netflix , or you can watch it streaming on YouTube. My personal preference on this is Netflix, since you get it in HD and the quality is better.
By now you know that I am a fan of the oddball, the quirky, the offbeat, in films. Today's must-see-cinema choice is Beat the Devil from 1954 (Wikipedia mistakes it at 1953), and it has all of that and more.
Trailer:
The movie stars Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley (playing the role that Sydney Greenstreet would have played had he still been acting), Peter Lorre, and Bernard Lee (who would go on to widespread recognition with his appearances as "M" in the earlier James Bond movies), and was directed by the great John Huston. It was "scripted" by Truman Capote -- if you can call it that: Each day's filming was done more or less by the seat of the pants and a lot of the actors made up their own in-character dialog as they were shooting.
The plot centers on a rag-tag group of small-time swindlers and shady ne'er-do-wells in a small Italian port who hatch some big plans to go to "British East" -- aka Kenya -- allegedly to sell vacuum cleaners(!) but instead to strike it rich some shady uranium mine deal.
Eventually they take passage on a questionable tramp steamer bound for Mombasa, but are forced to abandon ship off the coast of Africa and have to straggle ashore, where they are immediately taken into custody. The scene in the office of the local police/immigration official in North Africa is totally hilarious.
The Italian scenes were filmed along the spectacular Amalfi Coast. Watch for the classic Hispano-Suiza car (photographs) being allowed to run over the cliff and the ensuing dialog. Priceless.
I've referenced this movie before in this blog; longtime readers will know already that this movie supplied as a recurring line my pirated phrase, "a chill on my liver". I still say it all the time, when I am feeling a bit under the weather.
You can rent Beat the Devil from Netflix or, better yet, buy it from Amazon, because I have the feeling you are going to want to watch it more than once. For copyright reasons, it is not available on YouTube.
BTW, Bogart is on record as saying he never liked the movie: "Only phonies like it." Probably because he spent a lot of his own money bankrolling it. But, unless I am a "phony" (and I am not), he is wrong -- it is a terrific movie and an outstanding example of a box-office bomb that became a cult classic.
No one born after the 1980s has any idea about the nuclear Sword of Damocles that hung over us all in the 1950s and 1960s. We were all going to die! Duck and Cover cartoons created a grade-school horrorshow experience, complete with drills designed to help you protect yourself from nuclear Armageddon. Post-nuclear-apocalypse fiction dominated the reading public with such titles as Philip Wylie's Tomorrow (in which a lot of people survived by making adequate Civil Defense preparations), and Triumph, in which, despite the name, pretty much everybody dies. On the Beach by Nevile Shute was a best-selling novel in 1957, a long-story-arc comic strip illustrating the book and appearing on, in my local newspaper, the Opinion/Editorial page in about 1958 and an acclaimed movie in 1959. Spoiler alert: No one survives.
Into this depressing mix came a black humor (back when "black humor" had a different and non-racial meaning) movie, originally scheduled for a pre-release screening on Nov 22, 1963 but postponed to June 1964 because of the JFK assassination. The movie was called, to give it its full title, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Trailer:
Dr. Strangelove is a both hilarious and scary story of how the world stumbles into total nuclear war, all because General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) takes it on himself to get back at the commies who are busy "polluting our precious bodily fluids" with fluoridation in the water. And the names! General Buck Turgidson, Major "Bat" Guano, Major "King" Kong (the inimitable Slim Pickens in a role turned down by Bonanza's Dan Blocker because it was "too pink").
Mere descriptions can't do this film justice. If you haven't seen it, click on over to Netflix and get it in your queue. You won't regret it. This is one of those films that I can watch again and again and it never gets old. It is also available on YouTube for streaming, but if you are like me, you'll want to watch it on the DVD, where you can see it all and get it all, in all its glory.
By now everybody knows something about Edward Snowden -- wasn't he that traitor that sold out American secrets to...to...to somebody?
Well, no, he was the guy who blew the whistle on NSA spying on, well, everybody!
Citizenfour is a documentary from filmmaker Laura Poitras that chronicles the Edward Snowden affair from the first tentative contact that he made with her all the way through to his exile in Russia. When you realize that the American government not only has the ability to spy on each and every digital communication not only here but worldwide, but actually does so, then you realize that any right to privacy that you thought you enjoyed was just an illusion.
Watch as The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald interviews Snowden in a hotel room in Hong Kong, where Snowden landed in hopes that the Chinese would not give him up to the US easily. The matter-of-fact approach that everyone seems to take to the NSA spying is in itself chilling.
Snowden was charged in absentia with four violations of the Espionage Act of 1917, which a rational person would think only applies to spies during wartime, passing information to the enemy, that sort of thing. Or, from the true intention of the Act, just being one of those adherents to a "foreign" ideology (i.e., Socialism, Communism).
If you thought that was all it covered you would be wrong. As a group of lawyers offering their services pro bono to Snowden take pains to point out, it's much broader than that -- anything the government says is "secret" IS secret and you can be prosecuted for revealing it. Even if you can prove that the "secret" was unconstitutional and illegal. That is not a defense against prosecution and conviction.
So it's kind of a hollow reassurance to hear and see Obama in this movie say that Snowden should come home and face a "fair and impartial" prosecution by owning up to his "crimes"... Yeah, I wouldn't come back, either. The minute he sets foot on American soil -- or really anywhere within the reach of the long arm of American "justice" -- he'll be "disappeared" so fast that you wouldn't even know he was there. "Snowden? Snowden who?" will be the response if you have the temerity to ask. And then you will disappear as well.
Netflix doesn't have it yet, but they do have it listed so you can save it to your queue and watch it when it does come out on DVD. Of course the NSA will know that you have expressed an interest in it and you'll come up to the top of their "special list". Just as I'm sure I have for just recommending it.
Citizenfour won the Academy Award for Best Documentary at this year's Oscars. Of course the NSA knows how everyone voted, so don't be surprise if certain voting members of The Academy start mysteriously disappearing in the next few months...
This is also "must-see cinema". If you've never seen this hilarious movie -- or want to see the restored "director's cut" -- get it from Netflix -- it is available from various streaming locations, but you will want to see it in the best quality and the way director wanted you to see it. Be sure to look for the introduction by former Monty Python Terry Jones on the DVD as well.
In 1956 USC film student Kent MacKenzie shot a short film documenting the impending displacement of pensioners from the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, which was slated for "urban renewal", i.e., the destruction of ramshackle apartment buildings and down-at-the heels Victorian houses to make way for "progress" -- banks, office buildings and eventually the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
MacKenzie was so taken with the area and its residents that he returned two years later to film The Exiles, a full-length documentary look at the Native American residents of Bunker Hill, who were in a kind of exile from their tribes and reservation homelands. It took three years of filming and editing to produce this film. It took so long to document what is, on screen, just one night in the lives of his subjects that several of the principle characters were no longer around by the end, and the film had to be re-edited accordingly -- a couple of characters we meet early on have just disappeared by the end of the movie. In reality, they had gone to prison, a fate that has befallen so many "Indians" who are in exile from their homes.
The Exiles is one of those glimpses into a life that no longer exists. It's sad to think that, even by the time the film was released, it's likely that most of these buildings had already been flattened and the residents displaced.
You will recognize Bunker Hill when you see it. The Angel's Flight funicular railway and the 2nd Street Tunnel are both iconic landmarks in many Hollywood movies of the 40s and 50s and later. Television, too.
I first saw this in one of those film classes that I took in college ("Documenting Urban America" or something like that). I loved the movie, and I had almost given up hope of ever seeing it again.
But ... Fast forward to the DVD revolution and the advent of Netflix. It's now available on DVD from Netflix. The disk also includes as a bonus MacKenzie's student film, Bunker Hill (referenced above).
A Tennessee state rep, one Jerry Sexton (R-Fartknocker) wants the state to designate an official State Book. Not just any book, mind you, but the Big One itself, the so-called Holy Bible.
Aside from the obvious constitutional church-state issues (First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...") it is not clear to me what that particular book has to do with Tennessee. It seems to me as though an official "state book" ought to somehow reflect the history, the culture, or the literature of the state it is the offical book of.
While we are at it, I note that Tennessee doesn't seem to have an official "state film" -- I'd like to remedy that by nominating Stanley Kramer's great 1960 classic, Inherit the Wind, the story of the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial" starring Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond (the Clarence Darrow character), Fredric March as Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan), Gene Kelley in a non-singing and dancing role as E.K. Hornbeck (H.L. Mencken ) and a young pre-Bewitched Dick York as Bertram Cates (John Scopes).
This is another of my "must-see cinema" entries. You can watch the trailer here:
Okay, while the original Night of the Living Dead should be at the top of everyone's "must-see cinema" list, I am sure that everyone has already seen it like a million times. It's the most influential made-on-a-shoestring movie ever made, and it is the stuff of cinematic legend.
If by some off chance you have not seen it check it out here on YouTube (in Hi-Def!).
But it's not that Night of the Living Dead that I'm talking about here. No, I am talking about the parody-spoof version done by an improvisational comedy group called The LA Connection, who had a syndicated television show way back in 1985 called Mad Movies with the LA Connection.
This group would parody classic films by using the What's Up Tiger Lily? approach of making up a comic alternate dialog, overdubbed onto the screen images. In their short run on television, they did comic versions of some 24 movies, all of which are available for viewing on YouTube.
But my very favorite of all of these spoofs was their take on Night of the Living Dead:
Watch it. If you liked the original movie, you'll love this spoof! Hell, even if you didn't -- it's still fucking hilarious! Even with the poignant touch added by Lesley Gore's death a couple of days ago.
Last night I watched Punishment Park from 1971. Because of its incendiary content, this film has been hiding in the shadows for the last 40+ years. Even I, with my vast reservoir of movie trivia and leftwing significa (the opposite of trivia), had never even heard of it before I read about it somebody's list of their favorite dystopian sci-fi films.
Here's the trailer:
It was directed by Peter Watkins, a pioneer of the docudrama genre, who also made another film I loved,Culloden. Given that I was familiar with Watkins already, it seems a cruel oversight by the fates that I hadn't seen this movie before.
The setup of Punishment Park is pretty simple. It's 1971 and the Nixon Administration, using the little-noted Section 2 of the McCarran Internal Security Act, arrests all dissenters, war protesters, civil rights activists, feminists and all others determined to be a "risk to internal security". They are rounded up, taken to a remote desert location and given a "hearing". Then they are faced with a choice: Do the prison time of ten years or more, or do three days in something called Punishment Park. There all they have to do is go through a barren and waterless wasteland in a desperate game of "capture the flag" -- in this case an actual American flag implanted at the top of a distant rocky outcropping. Distant as in over 50 miles away. Without water. In temperatures over 100 degrees...
Of course everyone chooses three days in the desert over the ten-plus years in prison. What they are not told initially is that they also have to dodge the cops and National Guardsmen who are doggedly pursuing them. With guns. And Jeeps...
Shot in a hand-held documentary fashion, this film intercuts between two groups, one that is already on the run through the desert, and one that has just arrived for the "hearing". The actors are all non-professionals, but it doesn't show except for maybe a couple of times. There was no scripted dialogue -- the actors were given their characters' back stories and it was up to them to come up with the appropriate responses.
Like Watkins' other work, the whole thing has the look and feel of a real documentary, and it was entertaining, gripping and disturbing. Most shockingly, what with all that is going on in the country now, it doesn't seem at all dated.
Highly recommended.
And, wonder of wonders, Netflix actually has it for rental. If you get the DVD, be sure to watch the intro by the director and the included short, "The Web", about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which Watkins apparently made as a student.
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