Month: October 2023

Search for Intelligent Life on Cable TV

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Tonight, I watched for the first time Charlton Heston’s 1988, made for television version of “A Man for All Seasons.”  So, of course, when I watch it, I’m comparing it to the 1966 film starring Paul Scofield.  And that was a great movie.  Great acting, all around.  If I’m being honest the Scofield picture is better.  But the later film is still a pleasure to watch.  And that is because it is essentially the same story.  Both movies are based on the same stage play and for that reason both provide the same story and characters.  Even large chunks of the dialog are the same.

Both plays include an argument between Thomas More and his future son-in-law about the value of man’s law in God’s world.  It’s one of my favorite parts of the play.  He tried to make his daughter’s very idealistic and self-righteous fiancé understand that man’s law was made to deal with imperfect humans not angels.  And without it we would all be at the mercy of the powerful.

‘William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!’

The image of the law as a windbreak that protects us from the winds of merciless powers that rule the Earth.  Wonderful image.  The author is a poet, I’d say and a good one.

So even though the later film is not as great as the earlier one it is true to the play and this trueness to the story, even if in the hands of less able actors still manages to provide the same general experience.  There’s a satisfaction in watching a play that provides that successful theatrical effect.  It draws the audience in and immerses them in the scene, in the words, in the interaction of characters that you care about and believe in for the short time that you sit there and watch and listen.

And that’s a theatrical experience.  Most movies do not possess this.  Because the rule of movies is, “Don’t tell them, show them.”  And even a play is showing us something.  But to pull together a scene where the characters are in a space together and they collide and we get to see who they are by what they say is still a very powerful experience.  No special effects needed.  No need for fancy camera angles.  Think of how many great courtroom scenes you can think of.  Or a death scene between lovers.  The dramatic scene is charged with meaning and all that is needed is a poet’s soul to breathe life into it.  Even mediocre actors can take a wonderful scene and give the audience the catharsis that the writer created.

But the truth is this is a relatively rare event.  Out of the thousands or tens of thousands of movies that have been made in the last century or so what percentage have this quality?  I’d guess it’s much less than one percent.  I don’t have any figures to back this up but I doubt it’s a tenth of a percent.  Most of the “entertainment” produced is awful.  It has no soul.  And I’m not even talking about its morality.  I can imagine that art can be made that’s immoral or even amoral.  But what it can’t lack is an honesty about what it’s trying to say.  You can claim that the world is a meaningless maelstrom of death and destruction and out of that you can make art that could touch the human heart.  Or you can show us sublime love and the selfless sacrifice of a mother for her child.  And that could be art too.  But mostly what we get is dreck.  We might as well be watching a surveillance camera of traffic moving on a street.

I have three good movie versions of “A Christmas Carol.”  And I like to watch all three of them.  All three provide a close approximation of the story and therefore a similar feeling of catharsis.  And likewise, there are some other classic movies that tell a story that was so good that they’ve been redone.  One of Shakespeare’s plays or some other talented author’s work.  So, I’ll own several versions of the same work.  And seeing how different actors and directors bring the classic scenes to life is interesting to compare.  But the underlying experience is based on the skill with which the story was crafted and given human meaning.

All that was a lot of words.  Maybe it made sense to you.  I guess it can be boiled down to the fact that there are such things as timeless classics and they exist because they resonate with something inside our brains or minds or souls.  Look for these and own them so that when the crap that you can “stream” on some particular night is just too soul-deadening for you to stand you can reach for this DVD or Blu-ray or whatever technological incarnation exists and feed your soul with something that has meaning and maybe joy.  Or at worst find the book.

ShatnerKhan III – The Anti-Climax

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In these years of decay and barbarism even ShatnerKhan is only a pallid shadow of its former glory.  All the zest has been drained away.  How can we mock Bill Shatner when the present regime makes us look back with nostalgia at a time when tawdry power mad behavior and laughably bad acting was restricted to Khan and Kirk.  Now it’s everywhere.  Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Merrick Garland and most egregiously Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  Here we have a man whose original role as a bad comic actor has catapulted him into his present role as bagman for Joe Biden and the rest of the kleptocrats in Washington.  How can a mere ham actor and his Corinthian leather-hawking adversary compete?

Well, we’ll do our best today to celebrate the last few years of William Shatner’s already overextended time on this planet.  I’m not sure what facet of his career we will concentrate on today.  We’ve already hit all the high notes (such as they were) before.  Possibly today we will just reflect on the lessons we’ve all learned living in the wake of this tremendously opportunistic mediocrity who proved that post-World War II America truly was the land of opportunity, flowing with milk and honey for anyone with a room temperature IQ and a pulse.

Things may be a little quiet on the site today but I will check in from time to time.

But I’ll leave you with a taste of the Shatner that we all love to mock.  Here is what ShatnerKhan truly stands for.

Cape Fear (1962) – A Movie Review

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“Cape Fear” is a psychological thriller starring Robert Mitchum as ex-convict, Max Cady, looking for revenge against the man who put him in prison eight years before for rape.  Gregory Peck plays Sam Bowden Cady’s target.  But Cady’s real targets are Bowden’s wife Peggy and daughter Nancy.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Cady shows up in the small southern town where Sam lives and begins threatening his family in a veiled way.  Sam is an attorney and a friend of the town sheriff Mark Dutton played by Martin Balsam.  Dutton agrees to investigate Cady but the clever psychopath has carefully planned his campaign in a way that makes him immune to the local law enforcement.  He has a lawyer in tow who threatens the police with a harassment suit if they continue rousting him for flimsy charges.

But when his family dog is poisoned, Sam begins to panic.  He tries to buy Cady off with a $20,000 payoff but Cady explicitly tells him that what he wants is to attack Peggy and Nancy.  There are several incidents where Cady stalks the Bowdens and at one point Sam attacks Cady but he isn’t goaded into fighting back.

Sam pays a private detective to follow Cady looking for him to commit something criminal by which to force him to leave.  And he does do something heinous.  He takes up with a woman he meets at a bar and at a hotel that they go to for a sexual tryst Cady ends up brutally beating and sexually abusing her.  When the police, and Sam show up at the hotel the woman refuses to press charges.  She says that even if Cady goes to jail for ten years, she fears that when he got out, he would kill her.

Now desperate, Sam pays three thugs to beat Cady into a state where he would leave on his own.  Instead, Cady beats the three men till they needed hospitalization and one of them confesses that Sam paid them.  Cady’s lawyer reports Sam to the Bar Association for criminal behavior.

With no possibility of the sheriff for help, Sam thinks up a plan to trap Cady using his wife and daughter as bait.  He pretends to go to Atlanta to answer charges before the Bar Association while he sends his family to a remote location on the Cape Fear River on a houseboat.  But in reality, he arrives shortly after the family along with a deputy sheriff that agrees to help him guard the family from Cady.

Cady follows the private detective who was meant to lure him into the trap.  But Cady is too clever for the trappers and he manages to drown the deputy sheriff and by the time Sam has discovered this, Cady has menaced Peggy and abducted Nancy.  Sam arrives just in time to save Nancy but Cady knocks the gun out of Sam’s hand and then almost drowns him before Sam turns the tables and strikes Cady in the head with a rock.  Sam has time to get Nancy to run away before Cady returns with a club to finish him off.  At the last second Sam recovers his gun and shoots Cady.  Badly wounded Cady tells him, “Finish it.  I don’t care.”  But Sam taunts him with the news that instead of a clean death Cady would be locked up like an animal for the rest of his life for the murder he committed.  The movie ends with the Bowdon family leaving Cape Fear on a police launch headed for home.

This movie is a tour de force by Mitchum.  The rest of the cast is satisfactory but the picture belongs to him.  Watching his portrayal, I could easily believe that he actually was a degenerate criminal in real life.  He’s just that convincing.  Mitchum’s portrayal and the sense of helplessness that his plan instils in the Bowdens provides the audience with an atmosphere fraught with menace.  The movie provides effective thrills and a villain that everyone can love to hate.  Highly recommended for fans of suspense films.

Atlas Shrugged Redux

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Back before the 2016 election Michael Anton made the analogy that we had to rush the cockpit to save the United States from being hijacked by its domestic enemies.  It was a good analogy at the time.  But time has revealed that when the plane landed the airport police, the air traffic controllers, the baggage handlers and even the stewardesses and the guy in the Cinnabon kiosk are all working for the terrorists and they promptly haul you off to prison for interfering with the scheduled impact of your plane with a skyscraper or government office.

However, you want to characterize the 2020 election, about half the country voted for Joe Biden.  And for the last three years they’ve seen what Joe Biden is going to do to this country.  He’s run the country into the ground.  The opinion polls say Biden is something close to neck and neck with Donald Trump for the 2024 election.  In a rational world that should not be.  Biden should be polling at 20%.

Let’s face it.  The American people are either too stupid or too crooked to want to stop what is currently going on.  You can’t persuade them that they don’t want what they obviously want.  Women want the feminist future that they have been promised.  The non-white population wants their grievances against the white population to be endlessly acknowledged and restitution endlessly paid.  The sexual deviants want their constantly changing claims about themselves continuously celebrated.  The millennials and zoomers want Gaia to be appeased by returning the human race to subsistence level technology.  And they also want to have the government pay for their college loans and allow them to live a childless existence on a government subsidy that allows them to eat crickets, watch porn and eventually die meaningless deaths.  Adding all these groups together, apparently, they have the numbers now to get their way.

Well, then that’s that.  Democracy says they should get what they vote for.  The Democrats promised them all those things.  So, let the Democrats do what they said they’d do.  Joe Biden is emptying the Treasury, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and eventually all of our retirement accounts.  He is bringing in the third world, en masse, through the Mexican border and allowing the FBI and the Justice Department to enforce a reparations policy by allowing urban street crime to go unchecked against the middle class of the cities.  Everything looks like it’s going according to plan.

There is resistance in some conservative areas of the country like the South and Central regions but for the majority of the population it’s full speed ahead.  The east and west coasts are getting rid of gasoline automobiles and oil and gas heating systems and replacing the office workers and small business people in their downtowns with migrants, homeless addicts and gangsters.  They’re indoctrinating their kids to want to be transgendered and then they’re facilitating the sexual mutilation of these children as a way to eliminate as many people as they can.

And if that is what people want, they should have it.  All the areas of the country that want these things should get them.  And they should get as much of it as possible, as soon as possible.  The areas that vote against these things will have to figure out ways to insulate themselves from these policies.  They will have to make state laws that shield things like the use of fossil fuels from any federal mandates against its use.  The states will have to protect children from federally mandated educational requirements that try to introduce sexual deviancy into the schools.  The states will have to have their own requirements to deal with the onslaught of illegal immigrants.  And they will have to protect themselves from the Justice Department and its vicious anti-white and anti-religious policies.

All these things will have to be done.  But the states that have already succumbed to the coalition of the damned (listed above) must be allowed to enjoy all the benefits they have voted for.  And they are impressive.  Their cities will become homeless encampments reminiscent of the poorer parts of Mexico City.  Their electrical grids will become more theoretical than actual.  Continuous electrical service will no longer exist but instead will become a sort of patchwork of planned outages and accidents.  Their court system will no longer adjudicate those caught in the commission of crimes by the police.  Instead, it will be used solely against political enemies of the regime, basically, straight white men who still think they have rights under the formerly enforced Constitution of the United States of America.

All these things must be allowed and even encouraged in the areas where they’ve been voted for.  And after this has been allowed to go on long enough; years, decades; who knows; then maybe, just maybe, there might be a change of heart.  Enough of these Democrats might say, “Hey, why are things so lousy here and so nice over there in Florida?”  Why does cousin Dave in Texas have neighbors who live in houses with lawns while my neighbors live in cardboard boxes on my lawn surrounded by their own droppings?  How come he’s got a Walmart and a Home Depot down the road and all I’ve got is the welfare office and the local crack house?  How come he’s got four kids and six grandkids and all I’ve got is a son who used to be a daughter and a daughter who used to be a son?

Well, anyway, that’s what I think.