Bildwasser

Cinemoi has a few films coming up over the next week: American Madness, Baby The Rain Must Fall, The Eddy Duchin Story, Human Desire, Georgy Girl, Meet John Doe, The Jolson Story, The L-Shaped Room, Beat the Devil. Cinemoi is a little weird. It shows hardly any French films as I first expected, and the movie choices seem to be without rhyme or reason. But it's a good place to see an occasional film. And they will show the same movie a couple of times a week. Check their schedule for times.

I really know nothing about the work of the FNF, but just about any organization usually tries to increase its reach, so they might be trying to "discover" as many so called film noirs as they can. I almost have a mental picture of the various antiheroes from the noir movies rolling their eyes and taking a drag from their cigarettes at the idea of a film noir foundation. I understand the idea behind it, but it does jive a bit with the low-rent, down at the heels landscape of many noirs. Sounds like a place that Bob Mitchum might break into to heist something. I'm sure somebody has already done a study of how film noir has been marketed over the last few decades, an interesting peripheral topic in itself. It certainly has been very successful

One more sign: For a $500 fee Uncle Bob will come to your house and give intros and outros to your home movies. If he has to sit through them there is an additional fee of $250 an hour. I get a kick out of Pawn Stars. Somebody brings in a 200 year old item and they tell him how beat up it is. Of course it's beat up, mfer, it's 200 years old.

I didn't go to a Catholic school, but the stereotype of the nuns with their pursed lips and rulers at the ready is one of the most well known in popular culture. Like many stereotypes, there is likely some core of truth there that people recognize. And the public schools had some nasty types too.

The name Film Noir Foundation is rather amusing in itself.

So did the folks who went to Catholic schools duck and cover from the reds or from the nuns? Or both?

All of us are in the gutter...that's where the stars are...Hey got another cig ...and how about a light, you expect me to eat this thing?...Okay who took my French postcards? Bet it was that perv Kelly. *The Trial of Oscar Levant* Hollywood wit and raconteur Oscar Levant is put on trial when he makes a comment about Judy Garland's conversion to Judaism. He is also charged with somdomizing a poseur. Levant is tried in a California court, and is found innocent of the first charge, but guilty of the second and is sentenced to be a greeter for two years at the Reading Mall.

I don't like to think about it, but if these four got into a life or death dispute, I'd have to put my money on the Motor City Madman to be the last one standing.

Ernest Tubb with a later day hit, Waltz Across Texas. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjcwNKpiAnQ

It's not really a matter of falling into a certain camp, it's just the way things are. It does seem a little more bottom line than it was a while back, but it's not a real big deal. They have a certain brand to sell and that's what they're doing. The Universal Holmes-Watson movies were shown a few years ago at the same time that the first Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movie came out. Elementary.

For those few perverted souls who might be interested, Cinemoi is showing Age of Consent (1969) at midnight. It's the story of an artist and his model, who sometimes poses ****. The artist is played by James Mason and the model by a young Helen Mirren in one of her early film roles. Nudge, nudge wink, wink.

TCM is a business and the purpose of businesses is to make money.

The Meat Puppets, a song about Nothing.

The Beatles, Across the Universe.

I used to dread that Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Each year we went to my grandmother's house and had to sit through three or four hours of the apple-cheeked kids from White Bread High playing those marching band tunes.Yeech.

Of course Dylan isn't the only musician who is his own favorite cause, though he seems to feel that more than many. I always got a kick out of the far out stories he used to tell about his background after he left Hibbing. He was an Indian shaman who used to carry Chuck Berry's guitar pick and was the illegitimate son of Bob Mitchum, etc. I don't think many folks were fooled, but he went on with them anyway. I forgot that Hendrix also covered Like a Rolling Stone when he played Monterey in 1967 and that song later appeared on the Jimi Hendrix/Otis Redding live Monterey album. Haven't listened to it in years, but it's probably fairly bizarre.

Maybe, for whatever reason, he prefers the offbeat roles to the more regular ones. As he grows older perhaps he'll do some of those. Time will tell.

Roxy Music at the End of the Line.

I'm not much of a Dylanologist because I heard the Hendrix version before the original one. Jimi really did take it to a different level.

Whether by accident or not or a combination of the two, Depp's personalty does lend itself to jive with his performances. I don't really follow him that much outside of his movies, but he does seem to have that expat in France cool dude thing down pretty well (though I believe he's now back in the US). And he's obviously not the only contemporary actor who has the personalty/ performance reinforcing each other thing going for him. I like Depp for the most part.

It's almost always a possibility that $ might have had something to do with it, though in this case I really don't know. He likely had a nice sum coming in from all his back royalties and publishing. Jimi Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower is pretty cool. Maybe the folkies never quite figured out that Dylan's favorite cause has always been...Bob Dylan.

The Breeders, Invisible Man. The (Ingmar) Bergman edition.

Harry and Tonto seems to show up fairly often, though not anywhere near as often as the well-known usual suspects. I too thought of Larry Hagman's role in this movie. Not much screen time, but well done. I've noticed that one of the plot points of HAT, that of a widower who is on a cross country trip to visit his children, who are a bit screwed up, is also found in About Schmidt and Everybody's Fine. I don't think the latter two were deliberately copying it, but it's hard not to notice the similarities.

Ronald Reagan in Death Valley Days II: Return of the Gipper.

From the relatively little I've read about it, he felt that there was a contradiction between Islam and the music he made as Cat Stevens. He later changed his mind about that and went back to playing his old songs and recording new ones. I really haven't heard his new material. Hard to beat the golden oldies.