The Top Ten Movies of the 2010s

My list:

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Christmas: Komaneko

Tsuneo Goda's Komaneko Christmas (for all ages and languages and hearts).

Christmas: AGS

Andy, Barney, Elinor Donahue, Aunt Bee, and the future world's worst movie director celebrate that magical moment, Christmas 1960.

Christmas: Hitch

The Master, and very nasty: "Back for Christmas," 1956.

Christmas: Odd

Maybe the best of the two-million sitcom Scrooge rip-offs, December 17, 1970.

Christmas: HGWT

The best western show of all time at its most Christian, directed by the man himself: "Be Not Forgetful of Strangers"

Christmas: Staccato

Over the next few days I'll be putting up some of my favorite Christmas pieces, mostly TV episodes, and hopefully more rare than not. (How many times can you see Rudolph, Home Alone, or Frosty the Snowman?)

Leading off is everyone's favorite beatnik, Johnny Staccato. And a strange series it is. Not sure how much of Staccato is put-on by Cassavetes (since he was quitting the show every other week); or does it just seem like a put-on, because it's so plugged into such a specific atmosphere and moment? (See Kiss Me Deadly.)

This one, from Christmas Eve 1959 (Boog, Shrevie, and Fenwick must've watched it before the Colts / Giants championship game), is called "The Unwise Men" and stars the great Jack Weston. (Best part: JC's cheery closing.)

The Most Profound Half-Hour in TV History

Bootlicker

Originally posted on Amazon back in 2010, this review was recently deleted by the Bezos Gestapo. Reason given: anti-semitism.

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Some Brit by the name of David Aaronovitch has served up his gimp string to the Masters of the Universe with a book called "Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History."

First, Aaronovitch. A well-known Bushist neocon, his past work includes some journalism for the Times of London, a book called "Paddling to Jerusalem: An Aquatic Tour of Our Small Country" (gee David, I thought you lived in the UK), and three documentaries: "No Excuses for Terror" (unless it's inflicted by Israel), "Blaming the Jews" (wherein Aaronovitch posits a media conspiracy against Israel. . . hmmmm, I guess it's only conspiracies against goys he thinks are non-existent), and "God and the Politicians" (oh no -- Muslimism and extremist Christianisty will be the death yet of Jolly Ole England. Isn't that a conspiracy, David?) And how about that title? VOODOO history. Looks like David has some issues with African culture.

But since we're talking here about a mere court jester, and one whose writing style is akin to the boor at the next table who won't shut-up, focusing on Aaronovitch is sort of off the point. Meat. Filet Freddie. Peter Porterhouse. Viola Veal. David Aaronovitch. Oh, the lines are long for those wishing to make their bones by licking the boots of the powerful. . . (One should say it's no surprise in a book dealing with Grand Themes processed through a Politburo prism that there is actually nothing in "Voodoo History" examining the crimes discussed. The book is less than 400 pages long and yet tries its darndest to bluff through Dallas, RFK, MLK, Pearl Harbor, the bombing of the Reichstag, 9/11, Princess Diana, the moon landings, and whatever else Aaronovitch's secretary could come up with.)

The publication and mainstream media embrace (what a surprise!) of its ahistorical and shallow argument against conspiracy is, however, an important event. For it underlines just how full-court is the full-court press being played across the Western world by the forces of totalitarian corporatism. For awhile now I've been thinking about the connection between Establishment anti-conspiracy propaganda and the massive increase in both the police state and warfare state aspects of the US. The anti-conspiracy liars are more and more present because they are needed now more than ever, as the United States seethes with plots, devolving into little but dark conspiracies everywhere -- on Wall Street, the set-up of the Tea Party movement, stolen elections, Blackwater, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the "Christmas Bomber," and now the unprecedented Obama-ian attack on entitlements. There is now zero connection between what the national government says it's doing and what it is in fact doing, while all it is doing in every aspect is seeking to strengthen the vampire/warrior class. Conspiracy belief is on the rise because the world is becoming less democratic, less open, a world far less based on action and consequence, and much more on insider knowledge, fixing, and the talent for secrets and intrigue. (And murder.) Privatizing everything automatically necessitates conspiracies.

So this precious Zionist fop is nothing but one more hall monitor, an Elite butt-kisser whose sole function is to spread the belief that all power, and all the people (yes, everyone) who hold it, are LEGITIMATE. Only losers like conspiracy theories, those who have not "made it," those not brilliant and beautiful and witty enough to play by the rules and win by the rules. The world is a level playing field, says the fop, and conspiracy writers exist, basically, as history's version of the Lonely Hearts Club. It lets the Unbeautiful feel better about themselves.

Stop laughing. We all know that the Western world has never been further away than it now is from talent/brains/ability to love/ability to feel compassion/moral sense/love of the earth/a sense of history leading to "achievement" and "power" as defined by the Elites. (The Elite: what an inappropriate word for the subhuman scum which thinks of itself as our Overlords; an Elite which has obviously decided to treat the United States, its own country, as something to be occupied: raped, destroyed, vanquished, stealing everything in sight, burning down the place and then leaving. But to where?)

David Aaronovitch is just an old-fashioned court jester telling the King how great he is and not to worry about all that screaming and smoke from beyond the moat. Aaronovitch's purpose is to widen the moat and build high the walls. And his silly analysis of the actual crimes he writes about -- crimes of which he knows nothing -- is mere bootlicking.

Betrayed

A fine documentary on the Coup of '63.

Mad Ave '63

Funny how genius Don Draper in the dreck known as Mad Men never created anything as sweet, snappy, or sincere as this. That's the 21st-century for ya. . .

The commercials of 1963.

Even the Rain

In honor of the great Evo Morales, a repost.

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In Year XXXV (give or take a few) of Hollywood: The Vomit Era, Icíar Bollaín's Spanish masterpiece flows with moments rarely seen in the Marketeer States: rage, dignity, meaning, gesture, fellowship, purpose, self-forgetfulness, moral confusion, heroism -- while telling a great story with great pace. In 2000, a production crew invades Cochabamba, Bolivia to make an anti-Columbus period piece about the Columbian exploitation (and eventual extermination) of the native peoples. While filming, a rebellion breaks out over local water rights, involving many of the extras hired for the movie and led by a locally-hired lead actor. The silly director (Gael García Bernal), deeply in love with his own sensitive creativity (it brings tears to his eyes), tries to hold the project together, but when violence rains down on the village rebels, cast and crew seek to flee for their own safety and, if possible, finish the film.

'Though dedicated to Howard Zinn, Even the Rain's quiet humanity moves it far beyond mere polemic, as director Bollaín suggests, despite the communal nature of the movie-making process itself, movies -- through the demands of isolation and selectivity -- are a deeply private, anti-communal art form.

All performances are perfectly keyed, with Luis Tosar unforgettable as the hard producer turned rebel. Remains the best and most important movie of the 2010s.

Suchmos

A Taste of Honey

Anne Francis. Better yet ~ Anne Francis in a full-body black silk leotard, high-heeled black boots, and black leather gloves, kicking the tar out of all the bad guys; and one of the great erotic experiences of the 1960s. . .

The premiere episode of Honey West from September of '65: "The Swingin' Mrs. Jones"

The Worst Crime. . .

. . .of the Clinton Crime Family.

Yugoslavia, 20 years ago.

Dr. Michael Parenti:

Oscar

The Greatest Movie Solo Dance Ever?

Yes, it's done in blackface. And yes, we don't do things like that anymore. Yet Fred Astaire's tribute to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson is so deep from the heart; and so beyond race.

Impressions

September, 1963 -- McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums.

Tenor, John Coltrane, born 93 years ago today.

Sticks

"Pick Up Sticks" ~ Dave Brubeck piano, Paul Desmond alto, Eugene Wright bass, Joe Morello drums. The summer of '59.

Moon Man

The very first Gumby & Pokey (May 1956). Pure magic.

Cuck Land

21st-century USA: Land of mass-murderers and cowards.

Tuesday night in Times Square, a motorcycle backfires. Causing this:

Police State, anyone? C.J. Hopkins has some ideas.

Bouton

What a life Bulldog had.

Author of the funniest sports book ever (Ball Four), along with four other volumes. Starting Yankees pitcher in three World Series ('62, '63, '64). 1963 All-Star. Starter and reliever for three other ballclubs over a 16-year-career, while becoming one of the great knuckleballers of his time. George McGovern delegate at the 1972 Democratic Convention. Broadcaster and TV sports anchor. The inventor of the faux-tobacco bubble-gum sensation "Big League Chew." (Making millions of dollars from that.)

And later in life, after the tragic death of his beloved daughter Laurie in 1997, spent much of his time comforting the afflicted.

Perhaps most stunning, Bulldog as Terry Lennox stole the show in Robert Altman's 1973 The Long Goodbye, his first and only movie appearance.

Jim Bouton, RIP.

Understanding

There are collectivities which, instead of serving as food,
do just the opposite: they devour souls.
In such cases, the social body is diseased, and the first duty
is to attempt a cure; in such circumstances,
it may be necessary to have recourse to surgical methods.

-- Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

What is Swooning?

Frank Tashlin's 1944 answer.

Reminder

You really want to know what Bob Kennedy was?

He was fucking beautiful. -- AP reporter Joe Mohbat

Iyashi

Tomoyasu Murata’s stop-motion works are without dialogue: Nostalgia (2000), Scarlet Road (2002), White Road (2003), Indigo Road (2006), Lemon Road (2008). Slow, painterly shots follow characters around on journeys remembering relics of the past -- happy days with a family, a deceased child, a deceased wife.

White Road.

From Russia with Love

Worth a Million Words!

This:

Another view!

When We Were Men

"I got nothing against the Vietnamese. No Vietnamese ever called me nigger."

The Greatest indeed.

Part One:

Part Two:

Ride

"I dwell in possibility
A fairer house than prose
More numerous of windows
Superior of doors
Of chambers as the cedars
Impregnable of eye"
- Emily Dickinson

Bounty hunter Ben Brigade (Randolph Scott) catches up with his prey -- young shoot-`em-in-the-back outlaw Billy John (James Best). On their return toward Santa Cruz, Brigade and Billy run into Brigade acquaintance Boone (Pernell Roberts) and Boone's sidekick (James Coburn), two men also planning on taking in Billy John – in Boone’s case for the promised amnesty. Also met with is a lovely, slender, recently widowed blonde (Karen Steele), who becomes an object of love for the four men. Toward Santa Cruz, being pursued by five killers led by Billy John’s older brother Frank (Lee Van Cleef), Brigade’s route becomes the slowest, most open and circuitous possible, as it becomes clear Brigade’s real motive is not grabbing the bounty on Billy John’s head, but the inevitable confrontation with brother Frank -– the man who hanged Ben Brigade’s young wife.

Gruesome as the story can sound, Boetticher and Scott’s Ride Lonesome (1959) is one of the warmest, gentlest, most intimate and tender of great genre movies. And one of the strangest. It is built on seven sequences, alternating day-and-night: a very wide, always outdoors (there are no interiors) chamber piece. Charles Lawton Jr. and Henri Jaffa's color scheme flips from a faded daylight of sun, bone, silver, scarlet, smoke, rust to a Tintoretto darkness of vibrant chestnut, deep blacks and browns, fire. The movie is 72-minutes long. Yet what other movie takes its time as intensely and deeply as does this one?

Here, in a 3-and-a-half minute shot, Ride Lonesome breaks all bounds.

Roberts as Boone and the sweet, gangly Coburn move together in a loving and kind friendship. All the night scenes are luminous, as if in secret: very dark with still camera, forcing us to become part of words, tone, gestures. The characters in Brigade's group have their one-on-one with each other, usually at night. (Opposed to brother Frank's four horsemen who run away at first sight of their boss's blood.) The most likeable character in the story is the shackled young outlaw. And we want Billy John to be taken in by Boone: we want Boone and young Witt to have their place and their chance to begin again.

Director Boetticher's intimate chain has smaller links, reminiscent of Ozu pillow-shots, brief pauses where nothing happens except the beauty and tenderness of the pauses themselves. (Embraced by Heinz Roemheld's delicate, Sketches of Spain-like score.)

Randolph Scott, in his calm focus on the coming meeting with Frank, acts as the tender germ in the living plasma of the picture. We realize his love for Karen Steele by his choice to tear himself open and tell her of his kidnapped, raped, and hanged young wife. It sets us up for a fully satisfying and realized emotional and thematic closure -- one of the best endings we'll ever see.

The Naked and the Dead

One of the greatest of all war movies, now mostly ignored or forgotten, remains Brian DePalma's Casualties of War (1989). It is everything The Hurt Locker is not. Both works focus on an American cadre trying to survive in an unpopular war, and from that point DePalma and Bigelow take off in two morally-opposed directions.

For the Oscar Winner, the members of her cadre are mere objects to be aesthetically eroticized. We see nothing of moral weight or consequence (nothing that wouldn't occur to a 12-year-old), but there sure are plenty of brawny arms, magnificent chins, and deep glistening tans. Anything beyond that is chum since it doesn't get Kathryn Bigelow wet.

The DePalma movie -- and perhaps the explanation for its critical (Pauline Kael aside) and box office failures back in '89 -- embodies much more than just a statement against US involvement in Vietnam, and more than just a general statement against war. DePalma's movie, expressed in operatically emotional terms, calls for the rejection of power, the rejection of domination and demonizing; it calls for quiet, thoughtfulness, empathy and compassion. It spits in the face of many tenets of the American "character": brutishness, ignorance, aggression, hatred of women, fear of sex, self-justification, and the love of war. Brian DePalma sides with the raped and those who would protect the raped. Bigelow sides with the rapists and those who would mythologize them. Strange days, indeed.

What happens on the bridge is the only scene I've ever watched inside a movie theater where I had no control over yelling out. It is one of most powerful fictional scenes ever filmed. And it may be movie history's greatest scream against the endless violence of the "strong" against the "weak."

The girl on the bridge, named Oanh in the movie, is thought to be dead: stabbed to death by members of the cadre after they raped her through the night. But in the middle of a firefight, she appears.

This is what is being done, every day and every night, in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan by Kathryn Bigelow's mass-murdering "heroes."

Prayer

The fuzzy man over there in the corner, gazing away from his iPhone 6: Is it Lee Harvey Oswald?

That question has been the raging controversy within the JFK research community since the 50th anniversary of Dallas. Called "Prayer Man" because he seems to have his hands together as if in prayer, what we are looking at are the front steps of the Texas School Book Depository building 15 to 20 seconds after the fatal head shot(s). If that is LHO on the TSBD entrance, then obviously he is not six floors up firing bullets into Kennedy.

On this, I've done a 180. First I thought: no way. Prayer Man is just too stocky, too short, and too balding to be Oswald. Now I'm sure it is Oswald. Watch this movie by Australian researcher Bart Kamp and I think you'll be convinced as well.

(WARNING: very arcane, inside-baseball stuff regarding the assassination.)

For those wanting more, here's a brilliant two hours between Mr. Kamp and brother Rob Clark.

The Doctor

First broadcast two weeks after the dawn (the dusk) of Raygunism, Dr. Johnny Fever -- faced with the choice of soul and struggle vs. stupidity and cash -- makes the right move. We weren't so lucky.

A beautiful (and one-hour) WKRP in Cincinnati from February 7th, 1981.

White Heat

She is darkness, love, magic, passion, spirit, mystery, lustre, the sacred -- from a world where the blood has a different throb. And what is she (Simone Simon) tortured and finally murdered by? White bread efficiency and workload, Park Avenue psychoanalysis, the daily, the practical, the shadowless. She murders too: a preposterously roué analyst who sets up a secret rendezvous with her, but cannot come close to satisfying her lust. Irena’s refusal to sleep with Oliver (Kent Smith), her husband, is a blank space in the movie. For he is sexless (or gay), yet she seems to truly love him. Or perhaps it’s merely her fatigue toward being separate and alone. Her real tragedy. And ours ~ the literal driving lust out of the wind and out of the attic, out of all the lost primitive places.

Cat People (1942) is Jacques Tourneur’s first masterpiece and bears comparison to his greatest work, Out of the Past from five years later: Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) is also destroyed by the pull between the darkness of Kathie (Jane Greer) and the bland safety of Ann (Virginia Huston). It was made during the fatal turn the culture took from the screwball gangster Berkeley 30s toward the Mrs. Miniver/Going My Way 40s, when Hollywood (with major, major exceptions) moved strongly toward Greer Garson and Gregory Peck, away from Cagney and Lombard. As the husband, his future wife (Curse of the Cat People), and the soon-to-be-devoured psychiatrist bloodlessly decide to put Irena away, so too did movies lock away the speed, joy, mad love, and wit that made them great, as we shifted into the ever monotonous and slowing Forties. (With major exceptions.)

Vinyl

WKRP in Cincinnati (1978 - 82) has been lost to us. A late-60s spirit fighting the crest of pre-Reaganism, the show premiered only weeks after the California passage of Proposition 13 -- the tolling bell of our Big Dark to come (a Big Dark now lasting over 40 years). Reagan would, literally, kill it. Episodes considered outrageous by members of The Administration caused complaints to be made personally to the always whorish Bill Paley. CBS immediately gave WKRP's skulduggery the ax.

And CBS is still giving it the ax. The first season DVD release was beheaded: "Music rights are too expensive" say the Viacom Vampires, especially for a politically progressive series set inside a small rock-and-roll radio station. Most songs were eliminated or replaced by synthesizer versions. Because of a fan boycott, there have been, and will be, no more releases. Good for the fans.

The Reaganistas went particularly bananas over "Who is Gordon Sims?" -- featuring the great Tim Reid. (Reid's strangled-in-its-crib masterpiece Frank's Place [1987 - 88] has also been disappeared due to "music clearance" issues.) Through the looking-glass: "Who is Gordon Sims?" is a peek into a moment when one could get and keep a job without feeling like the FBI was closing in.

(Due to some fine people on the internet, the episode is restored, complete, with original sound and songs.)

Comfort

So let us celebrate our sure-to-be-snowy and frigid New York Spring with a beautiful episode from a perfectly beautiful first season. The show did shift over time. They lost and added too many characters. Mary Richards became too much of a (pre-)Yuppie. Too many boyfriends marched in and marched out. . .

But that's the future. This is where it began and the cheer, kindness and gentility of the first years seem to be from another dimension. A masterpiece of popular art, when it was great.

American pop culture was once as sweet and human as this? My gosh. . .

The Moon and the Stars

Happy Valentine's Day to mine

Out

Detour Ahead

With all years, we lose. Few years have taken so much from us as did 1963: John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis on the same day; Robert Frost and Yasujiro Ozu, Dinah Washington, Patsy Cline and Edith Piaf, Medgar Evers, W.E.B. DuBois, Elmore James, Jean Cocteau, Clifford Odets, Pope John XXIII, Herbie Nichols.

And Sonny Clark, at the age of 31.

Impressions

Dave Brubeck, piano
Paul Desmond, alto sax
Norman Bates, bass
Joe Morello, drums

"Plain Song"
"Curtain Time"
"Sounds of the Loop"
"Home at Last"

Herbie

Born 100 years ago today.

"Sunday Stroll" -- perhaps the most beautiful six minutes in jazz.