Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say, and instead it’s open mike night. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
3/30/2025
Anything goes #21
33 responses to “Anything goes #21”
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Brother, you need to see this:
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My brain’s gone. Saw Killer of Sheep on the schedule and thought I’d already seen it, but the description jars no memories. So fuck yeah & thanks. I’ll see it on a Monday, when most movies at most SIFF venues are just six bucks.
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It’s a beautiful film. No plot to speak of, but so many little moments that are inexplicably moving. Very lyrical, like Malick’s first two films, or Spirit of the Beehive, all of which came out about the same time.
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And any movie is better in a theater, where your mind can’t wander and the cat can’t knock anything off the table. Haven’t been to the Uptown in decades. Looking forward to it. And of course, Dick’s is across the street.
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Did you ever go to that Tati (Mon Oncle) the other day?
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It’s coming up on Sunday. I’ll be there.
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I am currently enjoying a “made for TV movie”, The Missiles of October, broadcast in 1974, about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It is remarkably well made and well acted. I was “there” reading the newspaper every day and watching the news every night, and have read a book or two about the affair. The producers and writers got the facts right in great detail. If you’re ready for the real story about how we almost eliminated living creatures bigger than a flea from the Earth, check it out. Thanks, as always, to the Internet Archive for preserving worthwhile content for future generations.
jtb
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It’s on my list, thanks, but the very finest Cuban Missile Crisis movie is Matinee.
Future generations… I love the optimism, John. There will be future generations, but I’m not so sure that Internet Archive will be around, or the internet, or electricity…
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We do notice a difference between a movie about living through the Cuban Missile Crisis and a movie about being part of the Cuban Missile crisis, right?
jtb
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Well, yeah, but next you’ll be saying there’s a difference between movies and life?
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Doug, have you noticed that there’s a difference between movies and life?
jtb
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The special effects are worse.
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Watch I Am Cuba, and have your eyes blown out the back of your skull
https://youtu.be/5RtATwDFvak?si=wPxWO9ed3v7g_Ocn
Matinee is indeed great
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I am Cuba (1964)… Huh, I thought that was a much more recent documentary. Downloading now, and it fits nicely with my stupid plan for watching movies alphabetically … the I’s are next.
Matinee is one of the movies that makes me second-guess everything about the movies. Squirmed and really disliked it when I first saw it. Frickin’ loved it when I saw it a second time, years later.
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Don’t get me wrong. The Soviets made some great movies and Stalin and Khrushchev told some great stories on which even more movies could be based. US capitalism and organized crime families abused the hell out of Cuba (particularly Havana) for three decades before Castro took over. Unfortunately, the Cuban people were just as ill-served by the Soviets as they were by the American crime network, both private and governmental. I’m referencing I Am Cuba, not Matinee, which I haven’t seen.
And alphabetical is OK. Zoolander wasn’t a screaming sensation anyway.
jtb
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Ah, thanks for clarifying. I was confused, thought you were taking Matinee very, very seriously. Ha!
The Soviets, being authoritarian assholes, prevented a lot more great movies than they allowed. But shebang, there’s some great ones. Stalker is the first one that comes to mind, only because I recently re-read the book…
Haven’t seen I Am Cuba (or as they say in Cuba, ‘Coobah’) but it won’t be long and I’ll check in when I do!
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History matters, science and math matter, literature matters, art matters, but they matter in different ways. They all have stories to tell about the universe we inhabit for a pitiably short time, and those stories are worth hearing and learning. Confusing storytelling with history and science is how we got Trump. We are a grossly ignorant nation on the decline. I’d prefer not to accelerate that decline by confusing a well-told story with the factual history of how we got here and what the hell we’re doing here. Metaphor is a lovely place to visit, but living there doesn’t move the ball down the field.
John
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OK, I don’t disagree, but what’s it about. Not Matinee, I hope. It’s not a study of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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Of course I had records by the Beatles and Zep and The Who and a Beach Boy or two, but one of my favorites wasn’t a rocker at all, but rather a deep voiced singer twanging on an odd contraption. The great Junior Brown has always graced my record collection and I don’t think I’ve introduced him out here.
So here he is, playing and singing one of my favorites, “My Wife Thinks You’re Dead”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruVhpupgm6M
jtb
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This is awesome! It’s country music, depending on your genre definitions, but it’s sooo much better than modern stuff. Great twanging, great story, pretty good singing, a few laughs, and toe-tapping all the way. Hope this guy has a long career ahead of him!
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Well, he has a running start at a career. He’s three years younger than me and has been on the road performing off and on since the late 1960s. The people he’s played with constitute a who’s who of country music, but, as you adroitly noticed, he’s a little off-country, although he’s won a few country music awards. He’s put out a dozen albums and when he got married he just drafted his wife into the touring band and kept touring.
He’s playing a guit-steel, which he pretty much invented. I won’t try to describe it; just search on him and check out the videos. It’s harder to play than it looks, and it looks hard. He’s never been a monumental success, but for nearly 50 years, the people you’ve heard about in Country stop and listen when he takes the stage. I’d say you nailed the analysis.
John
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Just played that song twice more and I still love it. My brother sent me a link to some Jesus band he thinks is fabulous, and I sent Junior Brown as my reply…
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Republicans are only concerned about hurting the “others” (whoever it is on that day) … they only worry about their wallets once they know someone other than them got hurt.
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All I see in Republicans is a staggering lack of compassion and empathy and giving a damn about anyone but themselves and, possibly, their immediate family. Official Republican policy is, everyone else can go to hell.
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Crucial Moments
Here are a couple of analogous activities which illustrate how just one second, one moment, can change an experience in a positive way, bringing an eventual smile to your face: falling to sleep, and having an orgasm.
You’re trying to get back to sleep, lying there trying not to think, listening to music coming from one side of the house and rain falling outside the window on the other. It’s three in the morning and you’re starting to get bored after an hour just lying there thinking, and about to give up and turn on the bedside lamp to do what you do in those situations: get up and pee, read in bed, check your email, maybe write something, or make a sandwich and watch TV. (I find that last one weird, the sandwich part, which a friend with insomnia does.)
Whatever you do it will often be three to four hours until you get back to sleep, you may recover the lost hours, but you’ll most likely have a hungover feeling when you wake up later than usual, waiting for the coffee to kick in and even things out.
What I’m highlighting is that moment when you’re just about to give up and turn on the light at 3am, and instead fall asleep, which you find out you did when you wake up later and look at your watch or the clock. The crucial moment was that brief second when you drifted into the desired dreamland, instead of turning on the light.
The analogous experience comes (no pun intended, really) when you’re trying to have an orgasm, with a partner or without. Instead of quieting down the brain you’re trying to keep it activated with creativity, excitement, and fantasy to achieve climax, though you’ve almost given up. Instead, you keep trying, that last second turns out to be the one where everything meshes, and you feel it roaring in.
Hard to be aroused is a well-known affliction of modern man, and women, but hard to come, its annoying twin, something which once mainly affected older people, now affects males and females of all ages, thanks to smartphone. The handheld device has, is, and will be warping mostly young men’s sex lives, which they find out when they finally have a real woman lying next to them, put down the phone, and are distracted by the learned-over-many years internet porn patterns.-
Getting back to sleep in the middle of the night and getting to that glorious moment of orgasm — two things often frustratingly elusive, but I’d never considered them in this way before, as similar. Hmmmm. inneresting.
When I was younger and my tool more reliable, I’d often take myself to orgasm as the way to get back to sleep in the middle of the night. These days, that in itself can take an hour, so it’s no longer the solution. Absent the alarm clock now that I’m retired, sleep matters lots less to me.
There’s a third needed pleasure I’d batch together with orgasm and sleep, and that’s the sneeze. You want it, you need it, but it doesn’t want to happen. Drives me bonkers.
Also worth noting, maybe it’s my fat man perspective, but eating in the middle of the night does help with sleep. Eat something really sugary and fatty, a bowl of ice cream or half a pie or something, and the sugar overrides everything and puts me to sleep.
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The important point here is that nobody has any rights in the US anymore.
Remember, Trump is the birther-in-chief. He demanded to see Obama’s birth certificate long before he considered running for President. He never admitted he was wrong and that Obama actually had citizenship. He’s now claiming that only citizens have a right to due process. But, since proving your citizenship requires due process, he could just throw Obama in Guantanamo and claim that Obama is a Kenyan, so he doesn’t have any right to due process.
If non-citizens don’t have rights, nobody has rights.
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Several titles on here I’d recommend, though some of them (Playtime especially) would better be seen on the biggest screen possible, not a laptop.
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Does Criterion do a freebie week every year? Several here I’d like to see.
I’m gonna cross my fingers that they’re showing Jackie Chan’s real Police Story, not the poorly dubbed and sliced American version.
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Not sure – I’m a subscriber anyway, so I never noticed this promotion until now.
Their disc of Police Story, and the version I just checked on the channel, is subbed (not dubbed) so hopefully the free one-time version is the real deal. That’s a great movie.
Playtime is in my top ten, but it might be worth waiting to see it on a big screen. It’s Tati’s masterpiece, his 2001. He takes his Hulot character and drops him into a ultra-modern Paris, and it’s as much a story about alienation as Man Who Fell To Earth, in some ways just as sad as that film, but still very much a visual comedy on the surface. I don’t think any film makes me happier, and every time I watch it I see some new gag in the background.
Cure is also brilliant, but I can’t remember what your tolerance is for crime/horror flicks. It’s not unusually gory, but it is psychologically very disturbing, and it’s a slooow burn. As if Tarkovsky had made a serial killer film. Incredibly moody.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnP71l5vSSY&t=116s
If you’ve never seen 8 & 1/2 or Beau Travail, they’re also great.
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Generally I’m fine with crime and horror, but dicey about extended cruelty as entertainment. Like, spoiler, Hamlet kills Polonius, and that’s fine by me, never liked the guy anyway, but I don’t need to see the rusty sword piercing flesh in slow-motion with extended blood spurts and eleven minutes of writhing agony and then flashbacks to see it again.
I subscribed to Criterion Channel when they first launched, but I didn’t last even a week. Their player wouldn’t work on my laptop, and their customer support was nil. My ‘talents’ have improved since then; now the only times I pay anybody anything for a video at home is DVD rent-by-mail obscurities from Scarecrow Video.
Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was brilliant. Haven’t seen Tati’s others yet, until Mon Oncle later today. I’d really prefer to see Playtime in a theater. If I get a chance I’ll mention that to the Beacon guys tonight. If not, guess it’s my recliner.
Man, if I had the money and energy and credit rating to move, I’d relocate closer to the Beacon. Takes an hour getting there on the bus from West Seattle, or I’d go much more often. They run the most consistently interesting programming I’ve ever seen on a rep theater’s calendar.
Sure, I’ve 8 1/2ed several times and loved it. Cure and Beau Travail, not yet but coitenly, as the Stooges say.
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Cure is no more explicitly violent than, say, Breaking Bad. It’s just suffused with a terrible dread, very unnerving. The idea is, basically, that “evil” just sort of exists in the world and floats freely from person to person, and the cops and doctors and other “do-gooders” are helpless to do anything about it – in fact, they themselves may perpetuate it.
https://youtu.be/EH8KQ017M-I?si=0HNlcaqhsbBgjdVJ
A lot of his other films are great, too. Charisma is very good, sort of an ecological science fiction morality play… or maybe not that at all. His endings are always great. In cure, a small, seemingly inconsequential scene in a diner implies that the world is basically going to end in chaos, and somehow he makes you feel it completely without showing anything of the sort actually happening.
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Excellent & added, thanks ye.
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