Young Frankenstein [1974)

Hollywood.

It’s been a bad week for Hollywood.

And a rough week for me.

But John Cusack hasn’t sent a hitman after me 🙂

Not yet.

I guess.

But let’s dispense with all these murderous liberals.

Let’s give them no more airtime here.

Jerks like Seth Rogen (who made jokes last week at the expense of a man in intensive care who at been stabbed nine times).

And let’s only mention Pedowood in passing.

The Hollywood run by pedophiles.

About which Corey Feldman has spoken.

About which Elijah Wood has spoken.

About which Ashton Kutcher has spoken.

About which Nicole Kidman has spoken.

And about which Stanley Kubrick spoke.

Ugly, nasty Hollywood.

Let’s not speak about Operation Broken Heart III (in which 238 “suspected child sex predators” [including “household names” as yet to be divulged] were recently arrested).

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-operation-broken-heart-arrests-20160621-snap-story.html

And yet, the “household names” seem to be slithering away so far.

So let us not talk of John Podesta, of whom we have talked so much.

Nor Kevin Spacey, who has preemptively (?) blocked me on Twitter 🙂

What do these folks have to fear?

Spacey, of course, famously rode on convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous Lolita Express (private plane).  If I am not mistaken, Spacey’s trip aboard the aircraft coincided with one of Bill Clinton’s MANY trips aboard that airplane.

So yes.

Let us not speak of this.

Let us, in fact, celebrate (?) the fact that I am actually once again reviewing a film in my own peculiar way 🙂

This was a personal favorite of mine as a kid.

Mel Brooks made a very fine film.

It hangs together nicely.

And the trio of actresses (Madeline Kahn, Teri Garr, and Cloris Leachman) who festoon this production bring a real joy of variety to the whole affair.

But the real star, besides the amazing Gene Wilder, is Marty Feldman.

Which brings us to Jimmy Savile.

Let me be clear:  Marty Feldman, for all I know, was just a damned funny comedian.

But he bears a striking resemblance to the infamous Savile.

And thus we must talk about what needs talking about.

Savile was a British eccentric.

[one who gave eccentricity an extremely bad name]

His Wikipedia page lists the following as his métiers:

  • DJ
  • television personality
  • radio personality
  • dance hall manager

But he will sadly be remembered mainly as a sexual predator who preyed (it seems) primarily on those in hospitals and psychiatric institutions to which he had access as part of his celebrity and “charity fundraising”.

He may have raped children (and elderly) in as many as 28 National Health Service hospitals in the U.K.

Said Jeremy Hunt, U.K. Secretary of State for Health in 2014:

“Savile was a callous, opportunistic, wicked predator who abused and raped individuals, many of them patients and young people, who expected and had a right to expect to be safe. His actions span five decades — from the 1960s to 2010. … As a nation at that time we held Savile in our affection as a somewhat eccentric national treasure with a strong commitment to charitable causes. Today’s reports show that in reality he was a sickening and prolific sexual abuser who repeatedly exploited the trust of a nation for his own vile purposes.”

So I should just go back to reviewing Young Frankenstein, right?

Or should I wonder why John Cusack has blocked me and thousands of Trump supporters on Twitter?

Or why Kevin Spacey seems to have blocked a very large number of people on Twitter who have (at one time or another) talked about “pizzagate” or “pedogate”?

Or should we talk of Cardinal George Pell?

This week has been a bad week for Cardinal Pell 🙂

New York magazine’s article title about sums it up:  “The Pope’s Pedophile?”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/cardinal-pell-and-the-vaticans-day-of-reckoning.html

That’s right.

Pope Francis’s “right-hand man”.

The man [Pell] in charge of the Vatican’s finances.

[remember the infamous Mr. Michele Sindona]

And for one more ingredient, let’s add former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s strange 3 a.m. tweet from last night:

“To the career men & women at DOJ/FBI: your actions and integrity will be unfairly questioned. Be prepared, be strong. Duty. Honor. Country.”

What the fuck?!?

I thought only nutbags like me tweeted at 3 a.m. 🙂

And Trump!

But Holder seems to be telegraphing something.

What the fuck is about to happen?

Something/Anything?

Nothing?

Will the U.S. “Deep State” (which appears to be so highly-addicted to pedophilia and occult ritual) finally be exposed?

Will Hollywood finally be exposed in such a way as to make Kenneth Anger rise from the grave?

What is this Babylon that we are witnessing?

In closing, Young Frankenstein is a very entertaining film…which I highly recommend.

No 🙂

Remember friends:  sometimes only humor can get us through the valley of the shadow of death.

And, for me, I pray to God.

I saw this wickedness coming long ago.

The level of vile crimes has already disgusted me and freaked me out before.

So I pray that you will be strong, my friends, as many bad things are revealed.

There are heroes in the world.

And those are such as former Navy SEAL Craig Sawyer.

His organization Veterans for Child Rescue is taking on the scourge of child sex trafficking.

He’s a sniper.

He’s been to war.

He’s not afraid of guys in suits.

Guys like Podesta and Soros.

And he’s not alone.

He’s been on the teams that go in and rescue kids that are literally in cages.

Check out that first article above.

It’s talking about a 6-year-old kid being raped.

The kid is lent out by the parent for $250 dollars.

And it gets much worse than that.

Let’s not talk about New York City Mayor Bill di Blasio’s employee Jacob Schwartz who was recently busted for child pornography.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4546320/De-Blasio-employee-arrested-child-pornography.html

My friends, this young man (age 29) was apparently aroused by sexual photos of SIX-MONTH-OLD BABIES.

And I have to say it one more time:  it gets worse than that.

So when you see photos of Mr. Schwartz and Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, pay those photos no mind, right?

And when you find to what ends Mr. Mook and Mr. John Podesta (Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair) went to concoct the “Russian collusion” (or, variously, “Russian hacking”) story which the largely-liberal U.S. media swallowed whole-cloth, you might begin to wonder just what dark secrets Mr. Podesta (and Hillary Clinton, for that matter) is hiding.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/04/21/shattered-revelation-clinton-campaign-hatched-russian-hacking-narrative-24-hours-after-hillarys-loss/

For those in a hurry:

“That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

The quote comes from Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s book Shattered:  Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.

So once again, see Young Frankenstein 🙂

 

-PD

Sixteen Candles [1984)

If you don’t believe John Hughes was a genius, see this film.

Seriously.

Because I didn’t believe.

Though Hughes made one of my favorite 1980s comedies (Planes, Trains and Automobiles), I didn’t really get it.

It being the John Hughes phenomenon.

While the cool kids had it figured out long ago, I was too contrarian to listen.

Now I get it.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles is truly a special film, but Sixteen Candles is transcendent art.

Don’t laugh.

What would André Bazin make of this film?  Or Gilles Deleuze?  Or Christian Metz?

Who cares???

Well, I care…

But what’s important is what YOU make of it.

And in this case, what I make of it.

But let’s get one thing straight:  Molly Ringwald invented the archetype which Thora Birch and Kat Dennings would later appropriate in doubtless homage.

Which is to say, Molly Ringwald is otherworldly as an actress in this film.

It’s no wonder Jean-Luc Godard cast her in his wonderful, underrated, masterful version of King Lear (1987).

Quentin Tarantino famously claimed (Ă  la Bob Dylan’s conflated biography circa-1962) that he was in King Lear, but Molly Ringwald was ACTUALLY in it.

But enough about QT and nix on the digressions.

So no, I am no Henri Langlois to claim that Sixteen Candles should be in MoMA’s permanent collection, but there is good reason to compare this film favorably to Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings of 1939.

But none of this shit really matters.

What matters is the part in Gedde Watanabe’s hair at the dinner table.

And even more so (big time)–> is the indescribable Anthony Michael Hall.

AT&T gets it.  Which means the seemingly wonderful Milana Vayntrub ostensibly gets it.

But I’m not sure the understanding flows both ways.

Because America has changed.

We are much closer to the year 1984 (as opposed to Orwell’s 1984) here in late-2016 than to any other period of American experience.

Yeah, Michael Schoeffling could only come from the Reagan era.

But he’s a great guy.  And a fine actor.

And Sixteen Candles teaches us a lot of stuff.

John Hughes, as a film philosopher, is precocious in his grasp of American society in the 1980s.

The outcast wins.

But the conservative wins too.

Really, everybody wins.

That’s what value-creation will do.

But let’s back to A.M. Hall.  This bloke…

What a performance!

And the real chemistry in this film is between Ringwald and Hall.

In the auto body shop.

And so what do we get?

Romance.  Misery.  And tons of fucking jokes.

We must congratulate John Hughes as much for his writing as his direction.

The previous year he had written National Lampoon’s Vacation starring Chevy Chase.

Years later he’d write a stellar reboot for the series in Christmas Vacation (also starring Chase).

You want more movies Hughes wrote but didn’t direct?  How about Home Alone? [check] Or Pretty in Pink (starring Ringwald)?  [check]

But let’s get another thing straight:  this was John Hughes’ fucking DIRECTORIAL DEBUT!!!

But none of this shit matters.

What matters is Molly Ringwald crying in the hallway.

What matters is Molly practicing her potential lines before reentering the dance.

Molly talking on the phone with the Squeeze poster on the wall.

Molly freaking out and taking flight over fight.

And immediate regret.

What films do this?

Perhaps in 1955 we would have looked at Rebel Without a Cause in a similar way.

And rightly so.

Sixteen Candles is its progeny of uncertain admixture.

Looking through the yearbook.

And seeing the one.

The one who burns in your heart.

In America, this is realism (couched in slapstick and screwball).

Molly Ringwald is the loser who wins.

And Anthony Michael Hall is the hopeless dweeb who also wins…by sheer force of will.

There are genuine moments of panic in this film (as soft as they might be) regarding missed communication.  Telephone calls.  House calls.

And it adds just the right touch of anxiety to keep this film catalyzed and moving along.

But what makes all this believable?  The supporting cast.

John and Joan Cusack (especially Joan, whose life make’s Ringwald’s look like a bed of roses).  And John’s future MIT roommate (it would seem) Darren Harris.

But there’s one of the crew which deserves a little extra credit…and that is music supervisor Jimmy Iovine.

The tunes are right.  The attention to detail is solid.

Sound and image merge (as Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller had impressed upon Godard that they should) into sonimage (a word Godard would use for his production company Sonimage).

Even the cassette spitting unspooling tape onto the pizza turntable is perfect.

The cassette?  Fear of Music by Talking Heads.

Yes, Brian Eno.

And yes, “Young Americans” as they leave the driveway on the way to the wedding before the famous “au-to-mo-bile” scene.

David Bowie.

Even The Temple City Kazoo Orchestra doing Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G minor…briefly. [which lets our minds drift to Chaplin’s The Great Dictator]

Everything is right sonically.

The band instruments on the school bus.

The Dragnet quotes.

The gongs for Long Duk Dong.

“Lenny” by SRV in the car.  Half a car.

It’s so very sweet.  And sotto voce.  And real.

It’s a mix.  It doesn’t intrude.  You gotta unlock the passenger door to your heart to let this film in.

And a little Billy Idol as Anthony Michael Hall negotiates a Rolls Royce and a prom queen.

So rest in peace, John Hughes.  And thank you for this film.

Et je vous salue, Molly!  Merci for the film.

And thank you Anthony Michael Hall for capturing my youth and bottling it up.

Thank you Molly for capturing the one I loved and bottling up all the quirky, quixotic things which I cannot see anymore.

It is the immortality principle of film.

John, Molly, and Anthony…three geniuses of film.

I am profoundly grateful.

-PD