It’s an entertaining read. He chronicles the contradictions and frustrations when the oppressed find themselves the oppressors!
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Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items
25FEB2018 – Quote of the Day
Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman – A Science Fiction Movie Review
(Reviewer’s Note: I watched this movie almost three weeks ago and put it aside without finishing it because much better things were going on. Now that I’ve decided to finish it, I find that I’ve forgotten some of the details. Please forgive any vagueness or inaccuracies. Merciful forgetfulness has shielded me from a vivid memory of this dreck. But believe me when I say that this movie is as bad or worse than I represent it. Enjoy.)
As a worthy successor to a recent review (One Million B.C.) I have another TCM . Here is a movie that cries out for mockery. It has a plot so weak that I believe the writer must have been either a heroin addict, a congenital idiot or a democrat. This was a year after sputnik launched so the UFO is a big silver ball. The alien is a giant and he more or less fills up the whole ball. He’s a big bald-headed guy wearing a short dress that looks like it was stolen from the costume closet of the movie Spartacus. For some reason that probably didn’t even make sense to the writer, the giant is searching for diamonds. Alright, so much for the science fiction, such as it is. Now for the human interest. Harry and Nancy are a married couple with problems. Nancy is rich and has problems involving drinking and mental instability and Harry has a wandering eye for the ladies. When first we see him he’s at what looks like a diner with a blonde vixen named Honey wrapped around him complaining about how his rich wife won’t give him more money to spend on booze and trashy women. Honey is sympathetic. He has a plan to get Nancy’s money by having her committed to a mental institution. Honey is sympathetic again.
Switch scenes to Nancy driving along the roads of some southwestern landscape, cactus, sage brush and sand in all directions. She seems sad and drunk. And as she sadly, drunkenly drives along she sees giant sputnik flying around in the sky in a completely unconvincing imitation of anything moving through the air. Eventually it lands on the road in front of her. Nancy brakes into the shoulder and witnesses a truly unconvincing special effects portrayal of a fifty-foot alien coming out of a forty-foot sputnik. Most of the scene centers on Nancy screeching uncontrollably and trying to avoid the giant as he tries to paw her with his six-foot-long giant hand. Later on, we’ll learn that he somehow knew she was wearing a big diamond on a necklace. So, after a short encounter Nancy runs off leaving her car and stumbles into town. Telling the sheriff about the giant increases her reputation for being nuts. The sheriff tells his deputy to find Harry and tell him to bring Nancy home for a rest and a visit to the head shrinker.
Meanwhile Harry is now ensconced with Honey and bribes the deputy to say he couldn’t find him. Hearing Nancy’s story from the deputy gets Harry and Honey thinking that their big chance to have Nancy permanently locked up in a rubber room is at hand. They celebrate by going to Honey’s hotel room.
Eventually Harry goes to claim Nancy at the sheriff’s office. She nags at him until he agrees to go back for her car and see if her story is true. They find her car but the alien comes back. Harry fires a few rounds at the alien then bolts in fear. The alien catches Nancy and Harry drives off without her. Harry returns home and discovers that the alien has returned Nancy. She is lying unconscious on the roof of the pool house. She has scratches around her neck and her diamond is gone. Later on a doctor tells us that there are obvious signs of radioactivity. Science!
Now the sheriff decides he must act. He and the deputy agree to go out to where her car was and prove that there was nothing strange going on. Unfortunately, when they find her car they also find the space ship. The sheriff and the deputy go inside the space ship. Here they walk through a few rooms that seem to be sized for normal humans. And so, we have to ask ourselves how exactly does this giant fit in this space craft? In rough dimensions it appears that he would have to be curled into a fetal position just to fit into the diameter of the ship. And that is supposing that it was completely hollow. How would that allow these walls and floors to exist? And thus, my theory that the writer was a congenital idiot.
In one room they find a bunch of diamonds. Nancy’s diamond is there. They theorize on the scientific reasons why the giant wants diamonds. Science! When the giant returns they battle him with a pistol and a shot gun. I think I remember they blow either him or his space ship up with the shot gun. But I’m not sure. I think I was starting to lose interest at this point.
Doctors are summoned and Nancy is sedated. Harry plots putting poison in her IV drip but before he has a chance to she becomes a fifty-foot woman. Of course, all we see is her giant hand inside a room in the house. Eventually she goes berserk and breaks through the roof of the house and goes on a rampage looking for Harry. Now she is dressed in an impromptu fifty-foot brassiere and mini-skirt supposedly fashioned out of bed sheets. And all things considered she looks pretty good! At this point I reflected on the comparison between pretty and gigantic Nancy and normal sized but skanky looking Honey. Sure, the disparity in size might lead to marital difficulties but her huge size would guarantee that Harry would be pampered by his huge wife like some kind of rag doll, probably carried in her apron pocket and fed huge crumbs that collected on her clothes as she ate her huge meals. Well, enough of this random speculation.
Nancy goes on a rampage through town looking for Harry. Finally she pulls the roof off of the diner and finds Harry and Honey cowering in a corner. Nancy crushes Honey and grabs Harry in one hand and walks away. Finally the sheriff fires his shotgun at Nancy and hits an electric substation which explodes and kills Nancy. And Harry is dead too, although it’s uncertain if he dies from the explosion, the fall or from being crushed by a death spasm in his wife’s hand.
I ask you, is there a more ridiculous movie? Some will point to “Plan Nine From Outer Space” as a paragon of bad movie making and there is much justice in that. But compare the budgets of these two movies. “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman” had a budget of $80,000. Looking at Plan Nine it would surprise me if $500 was expended. Unless you can claim that Plan Nine is one hundred and sixty times worse than Attack then you must admit that pound for pound, Plan Nine is a better movie. So, let’s hail Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman as the movie that provided least for the money expended.
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931 Version) – A Classic Monster Movie Review
This is not part of the Universal Monster series. Paramount made this film and Frederic March was a pretty big star at the time so this movie was made as a serious literary drama. That’s not to say that the movie doesn’t contain scenes and effects taking advantage of the hedonistic exploits of Mr. Hyde. It does and to a degree that shows that this is during the pre-code period.
The plot follows the usual story line and we witness the happy, virtuous and talented Dr. Henry Jekyll metamorphose into the bestial sadistic Mr. Hyde. And we follow as Jekyll’s life and fortunes come crashing down. And of course, everyone around him is destroyed in the catastrophe.
The story by Robert Louis Stevenson was supposed to be about the duality of the human soul. The theory holds that the evil side of the human psyche is also the active/vital part and the good is the passive/weaker part. And in a sense there is truth in that. Our basest instincts are thoroughly hard-wired and are inseparable from the rest of our selves. Bottling up those instincts eventually leads to them bursting out in a destructive explosion. The saner course is to train and channel the energies of the brute and tame them to our better nature. So that’s the philosophy.
Now about the movie. Well it’s kind of fun. There are all kinds of outdated special effects and some hammy acting on display. But it’s a pretty well-done production. I think it’s an entertaining old monster movie. And I like it better than the later version with Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman. I recommend it to fans of old monster movies.
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21FEB2018 – Quote of the Day
Will you pray for me
When the roots of the oak
And my ribcage are braidin’
…
Catholic girl, pray for me
You’re my only hope for Heaven
by Tyler Childers from his song Purgatory (2017)
I like the imagery of oak roots braiding with a ribcage. I think Shakespeare would approve.
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Passing the Torch
The other day I was talking to a young guy at work. Now, by young I’m talking relatively. Looking at him and basing my opinion on appearance, work experience, the fact that he has a wife and a child, I’d say he’s somewhere between 27 and 32 years old. Well, we were discussing stuff and Fred Flintstone came up. We were talking about car tires and how Fred could chisel out a spare when he got a flat. There were some general comments on the unenlightened character of Fred and I said that Fred was a cartoon copy of the Jackie Gleason character Ralph Kramden and how Ralph was a comical but fair representation of the working class guy of the nineteen fifties. This elicited blank unrecognition of Jackie Gleason, Ralph Kramden and the Honeymooners in general. I guess this surprised me. After all older shows that I watched on TV as a kid were still well known to younger people. For instance, The Three Stooges were from the 1930s and 1940s and yet they are a fixture on television and are still relatively well-known. I guessed that the Honeymooners must have disappeared from television far enough back to completely disappear from the present adult population’s collective TV consciousness. That bothered me.
Why do I think that the Honeymooners shouldn’t disappear? First of all I don’t pretend that the Kramden household represents some golden age portrayal of American marital bliss. Ralph is portrayed as pretty dimwitted and Alice is given a certain amount of the female empowerment motive that has reached its disgusting fruition in our present feminized society. She often wins the argument by proving to Ralph just how superior she is and how unfair her role as homemaker is. Deference to her moral superiority is on display most of the time. But the basis of the show is the underlying rock-bottom premise that a man should be the king of his castle. Even in the derisive arguments that Alice gives Ralph at every turn is the bottom line of “so if you’re the boss, what do we do now?” No matter what dumb thing Kramden does, he is the master of his soul. He will have to find a way to prevail. And like it or not, Alice will have to back his play. And good, bad or indifferent she would rather go along with him than go it alone. He may be the lowest rung on the totem pole but he is still the alpha male. And in a few episodes he does get to prove himself the king. The one that stands out is of course one of the least plausible. Ralph has obtained a bag full of counterfeit money. When the gangsters catch up with him they threaten Alice and the neighbors and when Ralph defies them they take him in the back room at gunpoint to work him over and make him comply on giving them the money. And in this crisis Ralph prevails. He beats up the thug and rescues his wife and neighbors. Of course, in the next minute he tries to cash in on his achievement and makes himself ridiculous, but his victory stands as proof that he is the man of the house. And for once even Alice can’t diminish his victory.
And the other aspect that endears the show to me is the working class ethos. For the most part, American TV exists to reflect the world-view and the sensibilities of the upper middle class. Even when they are portrayed as struggling twenty-somethings you can see that missing a meal or not having the status symbol item is not part of their existence. They are the cloud people. By contrast, the Kramdens and the Nortons (their upstairs friends and neighbors) don’t have two nickels to rub together. Even buying a new bowling ball can be outside the realm of possibility. These are people who aspire to be lower middle class. Ralph dreams up countless get rich quick schemes to allow him to make Alice proud of him. And he always fails but he never gives up. That is the kind of message that the young people need to get. Not that everything will be handed to them on a silver platter. And not that they can’t decide what is good enough for them. For that is the message that is out there now. The government will provide what you need and also decide what you don’t need (or deserve).
So I’m going to do my best to spread the word to the kids about Ralph Kramden and the Honeymooners. I think the show is an antidote for the namby pamby male sterotypes currently infesting television and the movies. He may be a colossal failure but he certainly is king of his castle. And that’s a good thing to be.
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Guns, Germs and Steel – A Book Review
“Guns, Germs and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond is an extremely interesting book about what factors might be responsible for the varied trajectories that technological progress has taken in different times and places and by different peoples around the world.
Diamond reviews the history of the two most advanced civilizations found on Eurasia, namely the Far Eastern Kingdom of China and the Euro-Middle Eastern complex of cultures that succeeded from the Sumerians. He catalogs the series innovations that occurred since the end of the Last Ice Age that catapulted humanity from the Stone Age to the Space Age in the space of 13,000 years. Now this sounds like a long time but compare it to the hundreds of thousands of years in which the only progress was advances in stone spearhead technology.
Next, we are walked through the other civilizations that existed around the world. We meet the new world cultures in mesoamerica and the andes. We follow the Austronesians as they go from Taiwan to every island between Madagascar and Easter Island. We meet the various peoples inhabiting sub-Saharan. And we meet the Australian aborigines and the inhabitants of the New Guinea highlands. And we watch as these primitive cultures collide with the modern Europeans. And we see how the Guns, Germs and Steel of the title decimate these primitive cultures.
And finally, Diamond explains how the vicissitudes of geography are completely responsible for the difference between Albert Einstein and Yali the genius of the New Guinea highlands. Apparently we are all exactly the same. I know this because Mr. Diamond repeats it liberally throughout the text just in case you aren’t paying close attention.
And I will admit that many of the points are very persuasive. It is quite interesting how the Austronesian people developed along entirely different technological trajectories depending on what were the resources of the various islands they ended up on. So, those that ended up on New Zealand or Hawaii were able to progress to agricultural societies while those on wretched dots of land like the Chatham Islands barely clung to life as hunter gatherers. And the great advantages of inhabitants of Eurasia are fairly convincing. Being able to borrow from civilizations in all directions around you surely helped the people of Europe to advance rapidly. But when at the end of the book he hunts for a reason as to why European culture was able to outperform the Chinese and other Asian cultures in the colonial period he rather weakly claims that the comparative isolation of Europe due to the fragmentation into peninsulas and islands was the reason. To me this seems to be a case of blowing hot and cold. Or possibly the Doctrine of the Three Bears. This place is too isolated, this place is not isolated enough but this place is isolated just right! Seems a bit weak.
Well anyway, I learned a good bit about early human civilization. I also found out that the modern Japanese came from the Korean people. But I’m not sure I really believe that the Australian Aborigines are really that close to their own space program. But Mr Diamond thinks they are. Good luck with that.
It’s a good book and highly interesting. I recommend it if you can ignore the virtue signaling.
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Topper – An OCF Classic Movie Review
The pre-Oscar TCM movie festival continues so I decided to re-watch Topper. This is without a doubt one of the goofiest screwball comedies of the 1930s. Cary Grant and Constance Bennett are George and Marion Kirby, a young married couple. They’re rich and they live a wild life. They stay up all night dancing and drinking and driving around in a crazy fin-backed whale of a roadster. Their banker is a middle-aged mouse of a man named Cosmo Topper. Topper has a proper wife who wants Topper to get up at 8am and go to bed by 11pm and have lamb on Sunday and steak on Tuesday and boiled vegetables on Wednesday. She expects him to be the respectable banker so she can be part of high society.
When George and Marion show up at Topper’s bank one morning for a business meeting you can tell that all three of them think that Topper’s life is not much fun compared to the Kirbys. Driving back from the meeting George is characteristically driving like a madman around some hairpin turns when he gets something in his eye and crashes them. Staggering out of the wreck George and Marion gather their senses and realize that they have died in the crash and are now ghosts. Taking stock of the situation they realize they don’t have any good deeds on their records to allow them to expect admission through the pearly gates. The scene dissolves with the ghosts themselves dissolving into invisibility.
In the next scene Topper is at home with the missus. We witness the boredom of his respectable existence. At this point a mechanic shows up with the Kirby’s repaired sports car. Both the mechanic and Mrs. Kirby remark on how mismatched this car would be for Topper. His pride is stung and he takes off with the car. The car gets the better of him and he crashes it at the same spot that the Kirbys crashed. The Kirbys make their presence known and Topper eventually gets over his fright. The rest of the film is the tale of the Kirbys trying to humanize Topper and make his life happier. This is the good deed that they hope will get them into heaven.
With a plot this frothy everything depends on the characterizations of the stars. Cary Grant and Constance Bennett are at their witty best bantering together while teaching Topper to be a man and not a mouse. Roland Young brings his characteristic upper-class Englishman’s mumbling confused manner to his portrayal of Cosmo Topper and Billie Burke as Mrs. Topper is the outraged prim and proper wife who needs to learn that a husband still needs to be a man. An uncredited part has Hoagy Carmichael playing the piano and singing for the happy couple. All in all, I’d say this is a goofy comedy that from my point of view provides good entertainment. The story sails along and even the minor characters are well done and add to the fun of the story.
I give this movie 4 out of 5 stars.
Brevity is the Soul of Wit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a mathematician and securities trader who also waxes philosophical. The last of his books that I am reading is entitled “The Bed of Procrustes.” Now the title alone would guarantee I would want to know about it. In Greek Mythology, Procrustes is one of those idiosyncratic monsters that the Hero, such as Heracles or as in this case Theseus must conquer in order to eliminate Chaos and promote civilization or something like that. Freud made much soup from this sort of thing.
So, Procrustes had a bed that he let travelers sleep on at night. The catch was that if the sleeper was shorter than the bed then Procrustes would stretch him to the correct size. And if the sleeper was longer than the bed then he would trim him down to fit. According to the story up until Theseus arrived the bed-sleeper length optimization procedure had been 100% fatal to the “sleeper.” And when Theseus shows up he turns the tables (more furniture!) on Procrustes and performs a bed fitting exercise on him.
Taleb is using the metaphor of Procrustes Bed to represent how often in life humans look at situations from the wrong point of view. And he returns to one of the oldest formats to address his subject, the aphorism or proverb or wise saying.
The Bed of Procrustes is one hundred and fifty-six pages long. His other books like the “Black Swan” are four or five times as long. His next book will be written on the back of a match book cover. I approve of this trend.
I’ve started reading them. Some of them are pretty good. I’m comparing them to those other aphoristic writers Solomon, Confucious and Robert A. Heinlein (through the agency of his alter ego Lazarus Long). The emphasis is different. Taleb is talking about life from the point of view of a savvy operator not a philosopher or a saint. He has more in common with Lazarus Long. But there are many interesting observations and some of them are original in some aspect. When I finish reading Procrustes Bed and do some comparison to his peers I’ll probably have more to say, but one thing that occurs to me is to put out a regular quote of the day (week?) from someone. I’m sure it will make me appear wiser. Here’s the first one:
“What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.”
Shakespeare has Polonius declare that brevity is the soul of wit. Polonius is a windbag so you have to wonder whether Old Will believed this statement or not. But I find that, many times, less is decidedly more, especially when you’re under the gun to fit in blog posting into a busy day. I see that many bloggers churn out a couple of thousand words in a post. I like to put up about five hundred or so (and sometimes less). I know everybody is busy nowadays and I don’t want to impose so let’s stop right here.
2001: A Space Odyssey – A Science Fiction Movie Review
(Warning, this whole review is one long spoiler. In my defense this movie is 49 years old.)
The only good thing about The Academy Awards is that for the whole month before, TCM plays many good (and not so good) old movies. Last night I watched 2001. As the exit music was finishing it occurred to me that this was the first time in almost fifty years that I had watched the movie from beginning to end. Back in 1968 I attended the film in a large theater in Manhattan as part of a class trip. At the time I was a sci-fi fan but I distinctly remember becoming incredibly bored during the “Infinity” sequence. And sure enough, last night I found my eyes glazing over as I waited for Keir Dullea to stop making funny faces and show up in Versailles. And then it also occurred to me that it was actually a very, very good movie. So, let’s talk about it. You already know I don’t like the “Infinity” sequence. But I find the rest of the film is excellent. Not everybody cares for Kubrick’s style in film-making. There is a great deal of stylization and idiosyncratic imagery that bothers many people. And without a doubt it is highly un-naturalistic. In fact, the ape men were the most realistic as personalities. The other characters are decidedly wooden.
But without a doubt this movie is an amazing spectacle. The matching of images to the musical soundtrack is perfect. The sequences of space ships landing and maneuvering are shown as if they were dancers in a ballet. The “Dawn of Man” sequence is riveting. I could believe that the actual event was very much like the portrayal (minus the monolith of course). It captured the essence of human ingenuity. The desperate and sordid circumstances of that ingenuity ring true.
And then there’s HAL. I hate HAL. I always have. But he is the perfect Frankenstein Monster. And the arc of his crime and punishment is, for me, a thing of hideous beauty. His relations with the astronauts are as creepy and dishonest as some Dickens villain, something like Uriah Heep. Some people feel sadness when Dave lobotomizes HAL and reduces him to the level of a two-year-old singing “Daisy.” I never shared that sadness. I guess I’m more Old-Testament.
So, that brings us back to the “Infinity” sequence which sucks. But following it we have what I call the “Versailles” scene where I guess Dave lives his life out as a captive of the monolith makers. This is weird and I guess necessary to set up the conclusion. Dave dies and is reborn as the next stage of human evolution. And he is returned to our solar system and the picture ends with him floating above earth to the sequence of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and “The Blue Danube Waltz” playing us out.
In sum we have a fifty year old movie that is still visually stunning, that addresses the inexplicable advance of savage animals to the brink of interplanetary travel and the frightening prospect of facing our masters in artificial intelligence. What’s not to like? Well he could have added a few good-looking space babes but nobody’s perfect.