unwatchable - I loved Jane Fonda in Joy House. I just prefer her when she is glamorized and young – such as in Joy House and The Chase - not when she is either old or de-glamourized, e.g., Julia, Tu va bien etc. I haven’t seen most of her films. I haven’t seen On Golden Pond. I’d have to go insane first before I ever watched something like that! Isn’t it just Hollywood crap piled on top of crappy sentimental Hollywood crap piled on top of even more crappy Hollywood crap? Yes, yes, I suppose it is wrong to judge a film when you haven’t seen it and have only heard about it. Apropos of gangsters, Alain Delon, a superstar of the French Cinema, was accused of greasing one his bodyguards, and accused of associating with gangsters - I don’t know the facts - and this also brings to mind the crimes and follies of O. J. - who ran for 2,000 yards on the frozen tundra of Buffalo, NY, eluding massive lineman who wanted to tear his face off, Phil Specter who created rock and roll with his wall of sound manipulations, who, evidently, somehow murdered a gorgeous blonde; there was the Claudine Longet / Spider Sabich killing; and Robert Blake, who played one of the killers in In Cold Blood, which is a work of very great cinematic art, and who played a cop named Baretta in the TV cop show called Baretta - which makes everything easy to remember, though I can’t remember if it was Tony Baretta or something else. Anyway, back in the 70s the following lines where sung I think by Sammy Davis Jr. at the beginning of every episode of Baretta: ‘Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time’ - which is edgy and hip and gangland savvy because everyone knows it is not exactly profound ethical legal philosophy / theology to imply that it’s OK to do the crime if you can do the time but you shouldn’t do the crime if you can’t do the time! Getting back to Alain Delon - he was the French version of Robert Redford or at least the French version of Tab Hunter - even if he did associate with gangsters, didn’t Frank Sinatra do the same? And what about that girlfriend of JFK’s? Don’t you think Gloria Grahame was the pre-eminent cinematic gangster’s moll? She married Nicholas Ray, who, at the end of his career, was in The American Friend, a great film starring Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper. Nicholas Ray found his wife in bed with his 13-year-old son. Anyway, who knows if Delon killed one of his body guards? He starred with Jane Fonda in the a formentioned Joy House. He was in lots great films: M. Klein, Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, Purple Noon, Un Flic, Le Gitan, Joy House etc. Joy House was, by far, the best film that I ever saw Jane Fonda in. Just because she did a crazy-ass thing in going to Hanoi doesn’t mean Hanoi Jane must forever be branded a traitor. She did apologize. There are such things as youthful indiscretions! The late Natalie’s Wood’s actor husband - Robert Wagner - starred in a movie where he gets a girl pregnant and then he kills her to make his life easier. I’m not insinuating anything, I mean, I presume he is innocent, and last I heard it was not against the law to pretend you’re a cop as you run through the list of suspects in Natalie Wood’s untimely demise, and he was on the boat with her before she drowned, I’m just saying that it would be weird, in a foreshadowed kind of weird way, if he, you know, especially after he starred in that movie where he murdered a girl. I had some free time in June of 2011 so I was watching lots of HLN - Jane Valez Mitchell, Nancy Gracy - the whole nine yards of their coverage of the Casey Anthony trial. The key, to my mind, for the defense, in getting something less than a first degree murder conviction, for Casey to elude the gas chamber - was the fact that months elapsed between the time that a witness says he saw a human skull and the time that the police recovered that skull. The defense can then say the cops fabricated evidence during those months, because they knew Casey was guilty but they feared they didn’t have enough evidence to get a conviction. I can cite to you many non-imaginary authorities, both right-wing and left-wing non-imaginary legal authorities, who will tell you that the USA has thousands of policemen who fabricate evidence. You wonder how any prosecutors are able to ever secure any convictions in drug cases which rely on the testimony of cops. Getting back to celebrity slip-ups, Mel Gibson probably sees the wisdom in not leaving any more hysterical voice messages after he left that one hysterical voice message. Roman Polanski probably learned his lesson about not giving any more drugs to young girls so that he might take advantage of them, or maybe he didn’t learn his lesson, I don’t know. His film Repulsion starring a young and beautiful Catherine Deneuve is really something to look at. The whole drama surrounding Roman Polanski is a bad, bad nightmare. He directed Rosemary’s Baby – that’s a film about the Antichrist - it starred Mia Farrow, who married Woody Allen, who married their adopted daughter, and of course Roman Polanski, who, last I heard, is still running from that rape charge in the USA, was married to Sharon Tate, who was murdered by the Manson Family in 1969, because Charles Manson, the evil creep, wanted to make it look as if blacks were murdering whites, so that the whites would rise up and murder the blacks, because, evidently, Charles Manson wanted lots of black people murdered. You’ll notice that the scandals surrounding Roman Polanski are on a whole different level than the scandals surrounding celebrities like Charlie Sheen, Arnold Swarzennegger, Winona Rider etc. It used to really worry Marlon Brando that his son was stuck in a prison filled with killers such as Tex Watson - Watson was one of the murderers in the Manson Family. They say Watson got religion in prison and perhaps he has changed and is no longer a huge homicidal villain. I forget what the young Brando was busted for. Winona Rider, who was very good in Girl, Interrupted, as was Angelina Jolie, went through that stretch there where she was stealing everything in sight. I mean if you owned a chic boutique in West Hollywood you better lock your doors when you saw Winona Rider heading toward your place. But she seems to have cleaned up her act, at least we don’t read in the tabloids any more about her pulling heists. Angelina Jolie has tons of star power – she was really something in Beowulf - but her movies are usually second rate. The Good Shepherd with Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro was OK, but you wish Angelina had a bigger role in it. It’s about James Jesus Angleton and the CIA. She and Johnny Depp were good in The Tourist, which was directed by the director of The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, who I’ll have you know was born Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmark. And of course everyone knows that The Lives of Others is a great, great film. But what’s up with these long-winded Germans and the names they give their kids and their books? Recall August Ferdinand Möbius and his towering masterpiece on quaternions: Der barycentrische Calcül, ein neues Huelfsmittel zur analytischen Behandlung der Geometry darstellt und insbesondere auf die Bildung neuer Classen von Aufgaben und die Entwickelung mehrerer Eigenschaften der Kegelschnitte angewendet. Of course people are always going on about such and such being a great, great film, a towering colossus of cinematic art, but, then, after you watch it, you discover it’s not a great, great film, and it’s not a towering colossus of cinematic art, and, half the time, it’s not even a minor colossus of cinematic art. The Lives of Others is however a superb film. A former co-worker I used to know was going on and on about how great The Emperor of the North was, starring Ernest Borgnine. You’re not missing anything if you skip The Emperor of the North. Trust me on this one. It sucks. I was watching The Long Goodbye the other day, which some people say is a great film, but it seemed stupid to me that they would have Elliot Gould gun down his friend like that at the end of the film, the friend he drove to Tijuana, the friend who mailed him $5,000. Your suspension of disbelief gets hard to suspend when things get that inconceivably improbable. Sterling Hayden - The Killing, Dr. Strangelove etc. - played a nasty alcoholic. If you have a great actor with charisma, why not give him a role which utilizes his charisma? Sterling Hayden was in that Haley Mills film – Deadly Strangers – where Haley Mills, you know the cute kid in The Parent Trap, Tiger Bay, The Moonspinners etc., etc., plays a homicidal escapee from a mental hospital who strangles the psycho sexual predator who is stalking her. A young Arnold Swarzennegger is super bulked up in The Long Goodbye - this is 1973, more tha
n ten years before The Terminator - and the people who made The Long Goodbye didn’t even give him a credit, even though he dominated a scene or two. It was directed by Robert Altman - a creator of Bonanza - you remember Lorne Green, Michael Landon, Dan Blocker, Hop Sing, Parnell Roberts, The Ponderosa etc. - and Altman directed M.A.S.H. and lots of other films. I think his 3 Women starring Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duval is truly amazing. I hear it was based on a dream that someone had.
Let’s turn to Classical Dumb-Ass Theory as it pertains to Art and Literature. What was up with all those obese girls in Renaissance art? Look at Guilia Farnese - she was the girlfriend of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI. - she has a very beautiful face in Raphael’s Transfiguration, but she also looks pretty thick and muscular; she looks like she could play linebacker in the NFL. Artists in Renaissance times were often very dense upstairs. A person would have to be a real dumb-ass