"Hi, I'm Jerry Lewis. Bob Dylan has always been a protester not only to the fashion of his times but the trends of the thing."

"And that's super, simply marvelous. So when Parimutuel Records came to me and said, 'Hey, Jerry, whoever you want to record would you just do? Manilow would be good. You want we should give Barry a call? And I said, 'Uh-uh, I want to do Dylan 'cause he makes me feel good a lot and that's why I chose his stuff to be on my album 'Lewis Sings Dylan.' Oh yeah!"

An obscure but great clip of SCTV in 1984 at YouTube.

Amazing how long Martin Short has been around....

And amazing how long people have been kicking Jerry Lewis around. Here he is, in a musical scene, in his prime, in the 1960 movie "The Bellboy":

I ran across that movie on The Criterion Channel the other day, and I've been watching it in bits. I like watching things that can be watched in bits, and "The Bellboy" is great for that. As the opening monologue explains, "There is no story and no plot. That's right, I said, no story and no plot. It is actually a series of silly sequences, or you might say it is a visual diary of a few weeks in the life of a real nut." Perfect for our times. It's almost TikTok. 

"In 2019, Criterion started a streaming service called the Criterion Channel, which a few months ago added Criterion24/7, a nonstop live-stream feed..."

"... from its wide-ranging library of releases.... I watched the Criterion live stream (free to the channel’s subscribers) for 24 hours straight, recording the highlights and lowlights and whatever else seemed notable as my brain numbed and my eyes struggled to stay open...."

Writes Lucas Trevor, in "Criterion is streaming movies 24/7. I stayed up all night to see them. The films were from Hollywood and abroad, scripted and unscripted, good, great or unwatchable — and I watched them anyway" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I can't imagine watching movies for 24 hours straight (or even staying up that long), but it's an interesting experiment, because you're accepting what's on — like in the days of TV before Betamax and VHS — instead of selecting what you want. It's a way to push yourself out of your limitations, and Criterion is especially trustworthy. I've made it a free-access link so you can see what the movies were and read Trevor's description of them.

It's a really exciting sequence. He begins at 6 a.m., and by late morning, he's watching 2 of my favorite movies:

"It may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something."

Says Andre Gregory in "My Dinner With Andre" — page 59 of the screenplay — a 1981 movie. 

It's not 10 years later. It's more than 40 years later. But think of the things we're doing now just in order to be affected by something.

For example, there's Zoraya ter Beek, 28, who "expects to be euthanized in early May" (The Free Press):

She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats.

"I did everything by the book the whole time. They changed the rules, and I should be grandfathered in. I shouldn’t have to abide by them."

Said Tony Cavallaro, quoted in "Authorities Seize Alligator Being Held Illegally in Home Near Buffalo/The alligator, Albert Edward, had been with his owner for 34 years" (NYT).

He was 11 feet long, 750 pounds heavy and 34 years old, and until this week, he lived in a pool house attached to his owner’s home in Hamburg, N.Y., about 13 miles south of Buffalo.

The [New York State Department of Environmental Conservation] said that Albert’s owner, Tony Cavallaro, had a license for the alligator, but it expired in 2021. In an interview, Mr. Cavallaro, 64, said that while visitors to his home did sometimes take pictures with Albert, they never swam with him or rode him. Instead, they would briefly get in the water for a quick photo with the animal, often when he was sleeping, Mr. Cavallaro said.

Cavallaro bought Albert as a newborn and believes "the poor thing loves me."

I'm interested in the law here, the always enticing notion that the law doesn't apply to you. Cavallaro also seems to believe that the law of nature — the dangerousness of alligators — does not apply to Albert.

But what's missing from this article is any mention of the comic strip that was once central to our culture: Pogo. There's an alligator named Albert, and you don't cite Pogo?

ADDED: The Wikipedia article linked above describes Albert Alligator as "An exuberant, dimwitted, irascible, and egotistical alligator."

"You’re sitting in the office, and on the desk there’s the old-style intercom. The operator takes an incoming call, and then it’s like: 'Michael Nash, David Bowie on Line 4.'"

Said Michael Nash, describing something that happened to him in 1992, a year after he became director of Criterion, quoted "Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?/How the Criterion Collection became the film world’s arbiter of taste" (NYT). Much more at the link.

"It is incredible that anything as foolish would be made in this day and age."

"And the suggestions in advertisements and awesome press releases that there is something 'adult' about it, that is a little too strong for the kids, are sheer, unadulterated eyewash. It's as naughty as a cornsilk cigarette. There is ever so slight a suggestion that the prostitute, portrayed by Capucine, is admired by the madame of the bordello, played by Barbara Stanwyck. But that this is any more than the admiration of an employer for a highly productive employe is a thing that only the most susceptible to press-agentry might suspect...." 

Wrote Bosley Crowther, in 1962, reviewing the movie "Walk on the Wild Side."

I like the way Crowther, scoffing at the mildness of the suggestiveness, can only bring himself to mildly suggest that the Barbara Stanwyck character is sexually attracted to a woman. 

Why did I watch that movie? Because it's one of the movies the Criterion Channel has assembled under the heading "cat movies":

The only cat in the movie is in the opening and closing credits, which were done by Saul Bass:

"So, in Poor Things, Emma Stone’s character is basically a woman with a child’s brain. And in this particular scene, she’s encountering dance and music for... the first time."

"How did you start to develop this dance? It’s such an interesting concept."

Asks the Slate writer Nadira Goff, in "How Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo’s Delightfully Weird Dance in Poor Things Came Together/Choreographer Constanza Macras on the standout scene, working with Yorgos Lanthimos, and expanding the idea of what dance is."

The choreographer answers: "It’s described in the script as a dance that is really going off because she’s just finding out [about dance]. So, with that in mind, I tried to create. [The director] was not convinced about some things; it looked too much like acting. When we passed it to the actors, then it grew and took shape. Emma Stone also had really good suggestions about her character because she was working, already, on this way that she moves. She brought in locking the knees. That gave shape to this dance as well."

Stone's character is a Frankenstein creation, so we may well compare the dancing to the Frankenstein in "Young Frankenstein":

That Frankenstein monster is able to dance smoothly, but his singing is very rough. That's the joke, and that gets to the question I was googling when I found that Emma Stone dance: Why do dancers always try to look as though what they are doing is very easy (for them) and pure joy (for them) while singers often act as though it's quite difficult and even painful? That's a big difference between singing and dancing, and I don't think it's because singing is more arduous and hurtful. Perhaps it's because the opposite is true, and the dancer must hide his feelings lest the audience turn away. But we don't turn away when a singer displays a horrible struggle and deep pain. We like that. What's our problem?!

I formulated my question after watching Fred Astaire and George Murphy in the first part of "Broadway Melody of 1940" (now streaming on the Criterion Channel). The first musical number is "Don't Monkey With Broadway" (modeling, for future satirists, how 2 men dance together in formalwear while wielding canes):

The men are unhappy with their job. We see them complaining back stage before they stride out beaming with joy — joy that does not exist but that the audience demands.

Is anyone watching the new season of "The Crown"?

I was excited about the premiere of the new season on November 16th, and I started to watch episode 1.

I got about 15 minutes into it and impulsively switched over to the Criterion Channel, where I browsed the "Pre-Code Divas" collection, picked one almost at random, and watched it straight through to the end.

I tried watching the rest of that "Crown" episode the next day and only got through about another 15 minutes before giving up. Turned the TV off entirely.

Why is it so unwatchable? I'm not even up to the really bad thing that I've seen spoiled in various reviews. And by "really bad thing," I don't mean that Diana dies in a car crash. That can't be spoiled, and the show puts that first, before the opening credits, so at least you're spared wondering how they will depict that. (They show the car entering the tunnel, and you hear a crash.)

No, what I saw spoiled is this, so don't go there if you're avoiding spoilers. I'll just say I hate that device, but I hadn't got there yet. Should I force myself to watch to the end of the series because I've come so far?

"This girl wanted life! This girl wanted love!"

We watched that movie last night. "Three on a Match" — selected from from The Criterion Channel's collection, "Pre-Code Divas."

What a crazy movie! I'll avoid spoilers and just say: 1. Fantastic example of a woman who cannot be satisfied with conventional married life (even with wealth and a fine lawyer-husband), 2. Shades of "Reefer Madness," 3. Only 63 minutes long, 4. Who knew there was a boy version of Shirley Temple? 5. Don't expect to see much of Bette Davis, 6. Brief but great shots of Humphrey Bogart, 7.  Loved the sad piano playing in the girl's reform school, 8. Don't reveal the shocking ending! 9. Inventive method of communicating with the police, 10. I love the pre-Code era, 11. Made me want to watch more Ann Dvorak movies.

"One night, he had a dream, a nightmare presumably, from which he dared not wake. When he did..."

"... he ate a brief lunch, and retired to his room, took a large draft of laudanum, and, presumably high as a kite, spent the next three days and nights penning what would become The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, finishing it in a state of exhausted triumph. Here, the author—this one, me—would like to interject. Sixty thousand words in three days! Good God. Where, exactly, does one procure this laudanum? It sounds like a downer, and yet . . . did I read that cocaine was involved? So it’s an upper, mellowed by morphine? Can it be synthesized? Is it smokeable? Injected? Why aren’t we making this stuff now? . . . Ahem. What’s really remarkable is what happened afterward. Stevenson gathered [his wife] Fanny and [his stepson] Lloyd around him and proceeded to read his tale.... Fanny...  insisted that Stevenson had... failed to see the essential allegory of the tale. Furious, Stevenson tossed the manuscript into the fireplace."

Writes J. Maarten Troost, in "Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story" #CommissionsEarned.

"He raged at her myopic imbecility. They had a colossal argument, and then, pointing to the ashes of his work, he conceded that, well, perhaps on second thought, she’d been right after all, and he returned to his room, to his laudanum, and wrote a new draft, again in three days. I have a special affection for Dr. Jekyll, of course. I think anyone who has engaged in a course of action that violated their moral code, and did so not with remorse but rather great enthusiasm, will empathize with the tale. That it was written during the height of the Victorian era, with its buoyant belief in the inevitability of progress and rectitude, makes it all the more remarkable. Stevenson, clearly, had a dark side, and perhaps this too explains his wandering ways. The contented stay put. The disaffected always have one foot out the door...."

I read Troost's book a while ago, but I'm rereading that part because I just watched the 1931 movie — part of the Criterion Channel's "Pre-Code Horror" collection — starring Fredric March. Highly recommended. Excerpt:

"Tonight the touch points are going to include your hand holding another hand, your back against somebody’s back, your hand on someone’s heart space..."

"... and their hands on your heart space, and you’re going to take turns leaning in and out of two long-held hugs."

Said Allie Hoffman, the founder of something called The Feels, quoted in "Extreme Eye Contact and Other Ways of Dating/Forget dinner and a movie: Let’s see if we can gaze into each other’s eyes for three minutes instead" (NYT).

When it was time to touch each other’s “heart space,” some laid their hands directly on the left side of their partner’s chest while others made contact with just the tips of their fingers. Somatic practices like meditation and eye gazing have long been incorporated in relationships.... The innovation here is attaching this mindfulness style to first-time romantic meet-ups....

I can't imagine volunteering (let alone paying) for this kind of thing. Here are the first 2 associations that sprang into my head.

1. In the James Whale movie "The Old Dark House" — which I watched on October 1st, the first day it became available on the Criterion Channel, part of a collection called "Pre-Code Horror" — the owner of the house suddenly lays her hand on her hand on the bare upper chest of the young Gloria Stuart:

"She feels that curves are far more appealing than angles, and won’t accept photographs that do not show her a bit more voluptuous and rounded than the slim silhouette the modern woman has succeeded in making popular."

I'm reading something written in The New Yorker in 1928: "Mae West, the Queen of New York/The writer and star of 'Sex' and 'Diamond Lil' is calm, clear, and eager for success," by Thyra Samter Winslow. 

If you do a certain puzzle, which I won't spoil by naming, you too may have clicked on the link to this article from a century ago.

What to watch from the Criterion's "80s Horror" collection?

 

You can see the huge set of titles here. 

We chose the one where Hugh Grant says "I hear you're having trouble with a snake."

Pagan vampires, a two-hundred-foot worm, and a profusion of phallic imagery collide in Ken Russell’s typically outré take on Bram Stoker’s most infamous novel. On an excavation in the English countryside, an archaeologist (Peter Capaldi) uncovers a mysterious skull that he comes to believe belonged to the D’Ampton Worm, a mythical snake-like creature thought to have been slain long ago by an ancestor of aristocrat James D’Ampton (Hugh Grant). The strange presence of the enigmatic Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe) and a series of unexplained disappearances soon hint that the legend of the D’Ampton Worm may be far from dead.

Did we laugh? Of course, we laughed!

Why didn't I see it back when it came out (in 1988)? I loved Ken Russell. "The Devils" was on my list of 5 favorite movies. And, as a law clerk, I'd worked on the case about "Altered States." But I was influenced by the reviews of the time. Which ones, I can't remember, but Roger Ebert wrote:

People expect something special from Russell, whose inflamed filmography includes such items as “Women in Love,” “The Music Lovers,” “The Devils,” “The Boyfriend,” “Tommy,” “Altered States,” “Crimes of Passion” and “Salome’s Last Dance.” Every one of Russell’s films has been an exercise in wretched excess. Sometimes it works. Russell loves the bizarre, the gothic, the overwrought, the perverse. The strangest thing about “The Lair of the White Worm” is that, by his standards, it is rather straight and square. 

Not enough wretched excess!

I don't watch movies very often anymore for some reason.

I prefer short things, not necessarily TikTok short, but "How to with John Wilson" short...

 

When I do watch a movie, sometimes it's something new that I've been reading about — I saw "Elvis" and "Blonde" — but sometimes it's something quite random. Last night, I watch the 1921 Swedish silent movie "The Phantom Carriage." 

I like to keep blog posts short, though sometimes I go long. Right now, I can go short, because the Criterion Channel made this minute-a-half presentation of 3 reasons to watch the movie (with an especially interesting image at the very end):

ADDED: YouTube, quite appropriately, has the entire 101-year-old movie available on line.

Miniature effects.

Beautiful attention to detail. Touching, actually. And I recommend the movie, "That French Dispatch," which I watched a few weeks ago. I found that "making of" video because I was looking for something specific in that movie, a view of the outside of a multistory building, where you follow a character walking up various stairways, through rooms, up to the top. You can see part of that sequence at 1:00.

I wanted to see that because, just by chance, I was watching the 1958 movie "Mon Oncle" last night, and there's this sequence, which is clearly what "The French Dispatch" was paying homage to:

"The French Dispatch" is a Wes Anderson movie. "Mon Oncle" is Jacques Tati. I did not realize, when I was watching "The French Dispatch," how much of it was done with miniatures. I have no idea how Jacques Tati made his movies. I'm not sure I want to know! Maybe there should be a spoiler alert on that "Miniature effects" video, because it would be better not to know what, exactly, you're looking at. The old saying is that it's better not to know how sausage is made.

I don't like to use clichés, but I'm saying "better not to know how sausage is made" because it fits with something in "Mon Oncle." Obscure humor at 5 in the morning. It shouldn't be obscure.

You can stream "Mon Oncle" on the Criterion Channel.

FIXED: The second video is now the right one. I'd had the first video repeated. I deeply regret this mistake! 

"One of the reasons 'Secret Honor' is so affecting is that, with the distance of time, we feel sympathy for the man, especially because we are aware of how Nixon-hating..."

"... had a lot to do with a very personal reaction to the man. There was a sort of loathing that wasn't about politics, but about the way he looked and spoke and certain personality qualities of the sort that would have made him unpopular even as a child. And the truly challenging thing to think about is how he could have been politically effective if he repelled people on a deep psychic level. Bush-haters of today might try imagining themselves thirty years in the future, looking back at him as a mere man."

That's something I wrote on February 14, 2005, in a post called "Small and large falls." 

I'm reading that this morning after seeing this new piece at New York Magazine, "In Secret Honor, Philip Baker Hall Plays Nixon As a Wounded Animal." New York Magazine is writing that now because the actor who played Nixon, Philip Baker Hall, recently died. He was 90.

I was writing about "Secret Honor" in 2005 — 17 years ago — because I was teaching the Watergate Tapes case and I had a nice, new Criterion Collection CD of the Robert Altman film. 

"You think we imprison people on a whim? No, if you think our humanistic system capable of such a thing, that alone would justify your arrest."

Says a Stasi interrogator in the 2006 film "The Lives of Others." The "humanistic system" was East Germany.

I just watched for the first time, on the urging of my son John, who warned me that it was about to leave the Criterion Channel. John chose that movie as the best movie of 2006, noted on his blog about the best movies from 1920 to 2020.

William F. Buckley Jr. said it was "the best movie I ever saw."

The director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, got the idea for the movie from Maxim Gorky's description of a conversation he had with Lenin about music:

And screwing up his eyes and chuckling, he added without mirth: But I can't listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn't pat anyone on the head or we'll get our hand bitten off; we've got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any violence to people. Hm-hm—it's a hellishly difficult office!

In the movie, a character quotes Lenin — about Beethoven's "Appassionata" —"If I keep listening to it, I won't finish the revolution."

"'Someone could have filing cabinets in their office, but why not get the back of a VW bus, cut it off, put it on the wall and use it as a filing cabinet?'"

"To find just the right bus, the elder Van Peebles scoured salvage yards. Then he figured out a way to make real steam blow out of the tailpipe jutting from the wall. (The bird droppings on the skylight coffee table were fake.) 'He had this fanciful, wily sense of humor, and a love of the everyday.'"

From "MELVIN VAN PEEBLES/B. 1932/The artist filled his 'Blue Room' with scenes from everyday life and turned them into sculptures" (NYT)(excellent photograph at the link).

I hadn't known about the sculptures. I was familiar with Van Peebles as a film director. I watched his movie "Watermelon Man" on the Criterion Channel last month, as noted here. His movie "Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song" seems to be much more famous, but I found it unwatchable as we were expected to be highly amused by a woman having sexual intercourse with a boy. 

Another cold day, so no photos for the late night café, where you can write about whatever you want.

I know it's not that late, but it's time for me to shut down the day's typing, and maybe curl up and watch a movie — probably something on the Criterion Channel — or another stretch of the Beatles documentary — which I'm more than halfway through watching for a second time. 

I think the documentary is much more enjoyable on the second watch because I'm not distracted by the narrative arc — will they or won't they be ready to do a live concert? — and I can pay attention to the random details of particular moments. 

As for Criterion Channel movies, the 2 most recent things we've watched are "Watermelon Man" and "Suddenly, Last Summer." Both were chosen quickly after they showed up in the channel's options, and both were appreciated. "Suddenly, Last Summer" falls into a category I would describe as: 2 people are crazy, and one is more crazy than the other, but which one? Some of my very favorite movies fit that description. "Watermelon Man" fits the category: There is one central character, but 2 versions of him, before and after a big transformation.

"I met a lotta hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you? You’re 20 minutes."

My favorite line in a movie we finished watching last night — "Ace in the Hole."

ADDED: I'd started watching that movie a while back and forced myself to finish it yesterday after my son John — who ranked it as the best movie of 1951 — reminded me it was about to end its run on the Criterion Channel. It's a rather strange movie about a ruthless, ambitious journalist. It's got the most absurd scene involving a fur garment. I don't want to spoil it, so that's all I'll say.

AND: There are a lot of movies about journalism — usually presenting the journalist as a hero. For example here's a ranking, with "Ace in the Hole" at #46, but if you limit that to movies where the journalist is an awful person — which I'm not equipped to do — I'm guessing it would make the top 10.