"Many business people and investors are still hoping Mr. Trump will recognize the havoc he is creating and ease off his tariffs. But so far, he doesn’t seem concerned...."

I'm reading a column by Steven Rattner, who was counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, in "'Few of Us Ever Imagined He Would Go This Far.'"

I think Trump is concerned. Just not the way Rattner and business people and investors are hoping he'll be concerned. 

Why is this article illustrated with an image of Trump atop a weather vane, with his hands outstretched to feel the wind blow, and moving from side to side? It doesn't reflect what Trump is doing. Is it a picture of the business people's hope?

I think Trump has chosen his solution to a problem — or set of problems — and he's locked in. If he could be shaken out of his resolve by cries of "havoc," virtually everything he's started he would have stopped.  

Side trip: What does it mean to "cry havoc"? It doesn't mean to cry out "This is havoc!" It means: "Let's wreak havoc!"

"A perfumier designed the aroma to contain hints of 'pus, blood, faecal matter and sweat' so [Jude] Law could imagine himself as [Henry VIII]...."

"At the start of filming Law said he made sure 'very subtly' to use a dab or two of the stomach-turning scent. However, when he found that the smell aided his performance, 'it became a spray-fest.' "When Jude walked in on set,” the director, Karim Aïnouz, said, 'it was just horrible.' [Alicia] Vikander, who performed sex scenes with Law, gave a look of disgust as the actor [said] 'Even the camera operators were gagging. My memory is that we were laughing a lot.... [I'd] read several interesting accounts that you could smell Henry three rooms away. His leg was rotting so badly. He hid it with rose oil. I thought it would have a great impact if I smelt awful.'"

From "Jude Law has more than a whiff of Henry VIII in Firebrand/The film received an eight-minute standing ovation after its premiere at the Cannes film festival on Sunday" (London Times).

Watch Ms. Vikander approach the putrid actor:

I asked ChatGPT, "Can you tell me about other actors who have used smelliness to enhance their performance?" In classic ChatGPT form, I got a list of 5 items:

"Littlefeather’s 60-second plea for justice resulted in immediate and enduring personal backlash. She says that in the wings, John Wayne had to be restrained..."

"... from storming the stage to physically attack her, while in the aftermath, her identity and integrity were impugned (the rumors were so abiding that in 2012, Dennis Miller mocked Elizabeth Warren by calling her 'as much Indian as that stripper chick Brando sent to pick up his Oscar'). Littlefeather, who had acted in a few films before her infamous moment, says that the federal government threatened to shut down any talk shows or productions that put her on the air."

 From "Academy Apologizes to Sacheen Littlefeather for Her Mistreatment at the 1973 Oscars/Nearly 50 years after suffering harassment and discrimination for protesting Native American mistreatment, the activist will be the guest of honor at an evening of healing and Indigenous celebration hosted by the Academy Museum on Sept. 17" (Hollywood Reporter).

From the Academy's apology letter: “The emotional burden you have lived through and the cost to your own career in our industry are irreparable. For too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged. For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.”

"What is your greatest regret?"/"Almost succumbing to the pills over Marlon Brando—an overweight knight errant wearing a crown, and nothing else."

 Rita Moreno answers the Proust questionnaire (at Vanity Fair).

Amy is garnering and I'm raising my eyebrow.

It's like Politico is nudging me twice, saying Althouse, get on it, you must blog about Amy Coney Barrett getting paid to write a book. They use that word I have a tag about — garner — and a silly incorrect image:

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s last pick for the Supreme Court, has also sold a book — garnering a $2 million advance for a tome about how judges are not supposed to bring their personal feelings into how they rule, according to three publishing industry sources. The figure was “an eye-raising amount” for a Supreme Court justice and likely the most since book deals won by Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O’Connor, one of the people added. 

"The people" are "three people familiar with the deal." I think people in publishing should know better than to say "an eye-raising amount." The expression is "eyebrow-raising." 

From Merriam-Webster's "Learner's Dictionary":

To raise eyebrows means to cause other people to react with surprise or mild disapproval. To raise an/your eyebrow means to move your eyebrows up in a way that shows surprise or mild disapproval.

What the hell would "eye-raising" even be?!

FROM THE EMAIL: Jim writes:

Perhaps "eye raising" now means something so attention-grabbing that it causes someone to look up from their phone.

Possibly the most famous quote with the word "calamari" in it got uttered at the Democratic Party convention last night.

"The calamari comeback state of Rhode Island casts 1 vote for Bernie Sanders and 34 votes for the next President Joe Biden."

The "Calamari comeback state" of Rhode Island caught viewers' attention during its turn on the #DemConvention roll call across America 🐙🇺🇸 https://t.co/6tjma19Dq4 pic.twitter.com/4jp0thiAir

— Bloomberg (@business) August 19, 2020

I mean, really, is there any competition? I found "Top 12 Quotes About Calamari." It includes one by Scott Adams: "If you think it's easy to write jokes about fried calamari, you've probably never tried."

I don't trust this list, though, because it includes, as #10: "I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry" — by Federico Garcia Lorca. Maybe if you're a poet — from head to toe (from fin to tentacle) — you can visualize how that's about calamari.

If we extend our tentacles into "squid" quotes, we've got Aldous Huxley:

The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace,
The prurient ape's defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.

There's also this insight from Marlon Brando: "The most repulsive thing you could ever imagine is the inside of a camel's mouth. That and watching a girl eat octopus or squid."

And here's something Clare Boothe Luce said about the Democratic Party: "Its leaders are always troubadours of trouble; crooners of catastrophe ... A Democratic President is doomed to proceed to his goals like a squid, squirting darkness all about him."

Film critic David Edelstein is fired from NPR's "Fresh Air" after he tweets a short butter joke on the occasion of the death of Bernardo Bertolucci.

The joke — accompanied by a photo of the famous scene in Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" — was "Even grief is better with butter."

We're told, in the Hollywood Reporter, that there was "a backlash, which included actress Martha Plimpton." I can't see who other than Martha Plimpton wanted Edelstein fired for making a joke about the butter in that movie. That was such a common topic for humor when that movie came out. I still remember how one of my friends delivered her opinion of the movie: "It was excellent, albeit butter-covered." It was such a thing to connect Bertolucci with butter that if I'd written that modern "Dictionary of Received Ideas" I used to talk about, if I'd thought to put in an entry for Bertolucci, it would have been: Say something about butter.

So how did Edelstein go wrong? The movie has a man (Marlon Brando) and a woman (Maria Schneider) struggling through a sexual relationship, and in the "butter scene," the man tells the woman to get butter, which he uses as a lubricant for anal intercourse. I don't think any mainstream movie had ever had an explicit reference to anal intercourse, and here it was on screen, presumably simulated.

You might imagine that the problem with Edelstein's tweet was that it was too lighthearted, when a man had just died. But that wouldn't get you fired — Edelstein has done hundreds of film reviews on "Fresh Air" — and that probably wouldn't put a Hollywood actress into such a state of hostility.

But perhaps you remember what Maria Schneider said about what was done to her. As Hollywood Reporter puts it:

Schneider said in a 2007 interview that the simulated sex scene was unscripted and that she felt bullied by Bertolucci and unsupported by her co-star Marlon Brando. "I was crying real tears," said the actress, who died in 2011.

Edelstein says he didn't "didn't know the real-life story about Maria Schneider" and he didn't remember the scene as showing a rape. And he apologized:

"The line was callous and wrong even if it had been consensual, but given that it wasn't I'm sick at the thought of how it read and what people logically conclude about me. I have never and would never make light of rape, in fiction or in reality."

Is it believable that a big film critic like Edelstein missed the stories about Maria Schneider? I don't follow movies that closely, but I have 3 blog posts about Schneider's charges against Bertolucci, the third of which, from December 2016, has Bertolucci acknowledging the truth of what Schneider said:

"I wanted her to react humiliated. I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn't tell her... to obtain something I think you have to be completely free. I didn't want Maria to act her humiliation, her rage, I wanted her to Maria to feel ... the rage and humiliation. Then she hated me for all of her life."

Bertolucci said he wanted "her reaction as a girl, not as an actress." Brando went along with this. He was 48. She was 19.

From the NYT obituary for Maria Schneider:

The role fixed Ms. Schneider in the public mind as a figurehead of the sexual revolution, and she spent years trying to move beyond the role, and the public fuss surrounding it.... “I wanted to be recognized as an actress, and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown. Now, though, I can look at the film and like my work in it.”

The famous butter scene, she said, was not in the script and made it into the film only at Brando’s insistence. “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci,” she said. “After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take.”

How guilty is David Edelstein? He's at least guilty of not paying enough attention to the culture to have noticed and remembered this story. Why should people who listen to NPR receive his — rather than somebody else's — opinion of the various new movies that come out over the years? Why should we listen to any critic — or any radio show? I know why I'd listen to the radio show "Fresh Air" — because Terry Gross is a fantastic interviewer. Some movie critic gets to ride in her vehicle? That person is damned lucky. Should it be David Edelstein, a man who did not know of or remember what happened to Maria Schneider? Why didn't he notice? Why didn't it make an impression? Why is he so inattentive to the sexual abuse of actresses by powerful men — by Marlon Brando?!

ADDED: Here's the Martha Plimpton tweet:

*warning: rape JFC, David Edelstein. All day I’ve avoided noting this mans death precisely because of this moment in which a sexual assault of an actress was intentionally captured on film. And this asshole makes it into this joke. Fire him. Immediately. pic.twitter.com/NOITGeb7EY

— Martha Plimpton (@MarthaPlimpton) November 26, 2018

ALSO:Last year, Edelstein got feminist grief over his review of "Wonder Woman." Here's his self-defense (in New York Magazine):

“Politics was part of our life. People don’t seem involved or passionate anymore; politics is something distant."

And: "I was a Marxist with all the love, all the passion, and all the despair one can expect from a bourgeois who chooses Marxism."

2 quotes from Bernardo Bertolucci, from his obituary in the NYT. The director of "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Last Emperor" breathed his last this morning at the age of 77.

The obituary reminds us that some reviewers at the time, back in 1973, did not admire "Last Tango in Paris" and that the NYT own critic, Grace Glueck, called it "the perfect macho soap opera." I'm more familiar with the rave review of all rave reviews by Pauline Kael...

The film critic Pauline Kael proclaimed it “the most powerfully erotic movie ever made” and likened its premiere to the first performance of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

... so I'm going to take the trouble to read "I Won't Tango, Don't Ask Me," by Grace Glueck (March 1973).

IF, as my male filmgoing friends assure me, there is such a thing as a “woman's picture,” i.e., one that plays up to the romantic sexual fantasies of housewives, then “Last Tango in Paris” can surely be regarded as its male counterpart — the perfect macho soap opera. From the film's beginning, when its he‐man heel‐hero, Paul, engages a compliant Parisian playgirl, Jeanne, in a genital collision, through the very end, where Jeanne reacts to his aggressions with a violence that metaphorically expresses her own sexual rage, its fantasies comfortably reinforce the misogynist stereotypes that have always enabled men to regard women as something less than emotional peers....

[I]n keeping with the conventions of art and pornography in the Western world, [we never clearly see Paul (Marlon Brando) naked, and] the camera focuses frequently and frontally on Jeanne in her birthday suit....

[The two characters] embark on a game plan: They will meet at the apartment for sex only, avoiding all reference to their outside lives. This stylized — well, tango—is led, of course, by Paul. And it is he who is free to break the step, revealing fragments of his barren emotional life with the depth of a Holden Caulfield while abruptly dismissing any attempts on Jeanne's part to give voice to hers....

In the apartment, masochist Jeanne takes sex from sadist Paul as, in his hostility, he dispenses it. And often (as in the now famous butter‐and‐sodomy scene) it hurts. (Male fantasy: Women may protest, but they really wallow in rough handling; it's good for their souls.) At one point in the throes of aging adolescence, Paul, bids Jeanne insert her fingers in his anus to explore a notion he has about death; at another, he dangles a dead rat before her horrified face. But he has his tender moments; in one, he gives Jeanne a bath with a paternal condescension that might suit a 3‐year4old. (Male fantasy: Treat women as little girls; it fulfills their need for protection.)...

The rage that led to [[SPOILER ALERT] Jeanne's shooting Paul to death] is motivated, but again the act itself is focused on Paul.... [W]hat Bertolucci is really saying is (male fantasy): See what happens when you strip yourself bare for a woman? 

"That man threw chairs – it was wonderful!"

Said Rita Moreno about Marlon Brando, who got mad when she had sex with Elvis.

Brando, "the king of movies," was "one of the most sexual men on Earth" — much better at sex than Elvis, according to Moreno.

Ancient celebrity gossip from the 86-year-old actress. Why are we talking about her? She's the star of "One Day at a Time," which is a new Netflix show — based on the old TV show that was on from 1975-1984.

What is that guy-reading-a-newspaper painting in that photo of Melania Trump and Brigitte Macron at the National Gallery of Art?

Thank you @NGADC for the beautiful tour among your many galleries. The paintings are a testament to the influence art has among all cultures. I was glad to be able to view the exquisite works with Mrs. Macron. pic.twitter.com/4bpw7BBhPL

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) April 24, 2018

It's "The Artist's Father, Reading 'L'Événement'" (1866) by Paul Paul Cézanne:

In The Artist's Father Cézanne explored his emotionally charged relationship with his banker father. Tension is particularly evident in the energetic, expressive paint handling, an exaggeration of Courbet's palette knife technique. The unyielding figure of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, the newspaper he is reading, his chair, and the room are described with obtrusively thick slabs of pigment. The Artist's Father can be interpreted as an assertion of Cézanne's independence. 

Ah! Just like Melania asserting her independence from the unyielding figure of Donald J. Trump!



Looks a little like Trump, too, don't you think? Trump or Marlon Brando.

By the way, and a propos of the first post of the day, did you know that Marlon Brando was the Coen brothers' first choice to play the big Lebowski (that is, the rich old guy) in "The Big Lebowski"? (Others on their list: Robert Duvall, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Norman Mailer, George C. Scott, Jerry Falwell, Gore Vidal, Andy Griffith, William F. Buckley, and Ernest Borgnine. In the end, David Huddleston got the role.)

Who, when asked what religion are you now, said: "Now? Nothing. I'm a writer. I like doing things alone"?

Answer: James Baldwin.

I'm reading about James Baldwin as a consequence of reading something in the current news — Vulture — which is almost too scurrilous to mention. Quote from The Vulture (to go from the highest quality to the lowest quality remark): "Brando used to go cha-cha dancing with us. He could dance his ass off. He was the most charming motherfucker you ever met. He’d fuck anything. Anything! He’d fuck a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. Marvin Gaye." That's Quincy Jones, who also said: "Trump is just telling [people] what they want to hear. I used to hang out with him. He’s a crazy motherfucker. Limited mentally — a megalomaniac, narcissistic. I can’t stand him. I used to date Ivanka, you know.... Yes, sir. Twelve years ago. Tommy Hilfiger, who was working with my daughter Kidada, said, 'Ivanka wants to have dinner with you.' I said, 'No problem. She’s a fine motherfucker.' She had the most beautiful legs I ever saw in my life. Wrong father, though."

Sorry to burden you with all that, but I was interested in the idea that to be a writer means doing things alone — and that means not wanting it in your head that God is with you (which is a different  issue from whether there really is a God).

What made you think you could be an actor?

"Drudge... uses his personal Twitter account to tease his ideas and let his followers attempt to fill in the blanks on their own."

"In many ways, it's similar to how he works as a kind of news cycle puppetmaster with the Drudge Report, operating the website as a curated and intentional conversation that is wiped daily for whatever tomorrow might bring. To take Drudge's tweets too seriously, though, is an error. 'Ultimately [Twitter is] boring and the kids are always off to something new," he said [in a 2015 interview]. Of course, Drudge did not reveal that he was also off to something new — essentially 'breaking' Twitter to use it as a Snapchat-like blink-and-you-miss-it palimpsest for whatever comes to his mind."

From "The mystery and intrigue of Matt Drudge's Twitter feed" at The Week.

The 2015 interview is this (with Alex Jones). I've clipped out the part where Drudge rails against the corporate websites that mass human expression in one place:



"Don't get into this false sense that you are an individual when you are on Facebook. No you're not. You're a pawn in their scheme."

ADDED: I don't know what Drudge means in that clip when he says "the robots, which you're so profound on." The "you" is Alex Jones. I'm not a follower of Alex Jones, so whatever robot profundities have emitted from him I don't know. I know. I can Google it, but what will evil corporate Google let me see?

ALEX JONES: Folks, I have hundreds of articles I see every week about human-animal chimeras with no rights. You talked about people you know in research labs, I’ve talked to them too. You see humanoids, they’re like 80 percent gorilla, 80 percent pig, and they’re talking.... We need to make this illegal. This needs to be illegal. They’re talking about making it illegal to make child pedophile robots. Ok. Ok, make that illegal. But what about the humans spliced with animals? I mean this is beyond pedophila.

AND: That last bit makes commenter Balfegor say "That... that was a movie..." Ah, yes:

"He’s just a very plain, simple, common, ordinary, Nebraska cat. Really that is all he amounts to."

Said Bob Dylan about Marlon Brando. It was 1965, and Dylan was talking to Allen Ginsberg and had just gotten done telling Ginsberg that Marlon Brando "thinks about the universe, like you."

What sense does that make?

It means: common people from the heartland really do understand the universe.

Dylan thought Marlon Brando and Allen Ginsberg were both ridiculous phonies.

Dylan thought there's no reason anymore to harmonize one sentence with the next. It's all bullshit.

Dylan wanted Ginsberg to know that he thought Ginsberg was a gasbag.

Dylan was striving to improve his own stature as a man from the midwest.

It's name-dropping Brando and not a damned thing more.

 

pollcode.com free polls

Shirt tucking.

I see — from reading the NYT — that shirt tucking is in issue:

July 10, 2017: "Untuckit Strikes a Chord With Self-Explanatory Men’s Wear."

Untuckit, it seems, was an idea so ludicrously obvious that no high-paid marketing genius had bothered to think of it. And fashion insiders sneered when [Chris] Riccobono and [Aaron] Sanandres conceived the company in 2010.

“They said, ‘No, you can’t use that name, it’s not sophisticated,’” Mr. Riccobono said....

The guys who were tuning in, however, did not need to see the shirts... to get the concept. Before long, Untuckit was popping up in GQ....

July 12, 2017: "A ‘Dad’ Look Is Suddenly Stylish: The Tucked-In T-Shirt."

It has recently been a common style at runway shows staged by Gucci, Lemaire and Fendi. Demna Gvasalia’s most recent show for Balenciaga, built around the idea of bad taste and so-called “dad style,” also featured the look....

[Andrew Luecke, a co-author of the recent book “Cool: Style, Sound, and Subversion,"] noted that it is... in line with the ’90s nostalgia sweeping through fashion of late. Kurt Cobain and the guys on “Beverly Hills 90210” favored the look, and it was part of the uniform adopted by their 1950s precursors, like James Dean and Marlon Brando.

“It’s such an easy way to tweak your look,” he said. “It makes your outfit look cleaner. It can be a little formal, a little nerdy. You can take it in all sorts of directions.”

I like the way there are 2 trends, completely opposed and both premised on bad taste. The main difference is that the tucked-in look is working on the old idea that if you're cool, bad is good. The untucked look seems to be more about ordinary guys wanting to look and feel reasonably okay.

But it's the untucked look that is selling product. There's something specific to buy (a closer cut shirt with a just-long-enough tail). The tucked look is just something to do with an ordinary product you already have. Why would the fashion industry bother to do that — show you a way to update without buying anything? Maybe these people are just irked as hell by the money Messrs. Riccobono and Sanandres are making with their too-obvious product.

By the way, I did not remember Kurt Cobain for his tucked-in t-shirt. I remembered his huge, very bulky sweater. So I looked for some photographs and found this, which you might want to emulate, seeing as how there's ’90s nostalgia sweeping through fashion of late:



Marlon Brando photograph added for comparison purposes. Yeah, he looks a lot better, but tucking in your t-shirt, which one will you more closely resemble? Keep your objectivity is all I'm saying.

Patti Smith : Bob Dylan :: Sacheen Littlefeather : Marlon Brando?

No. Bob Dylan is not declining the Nobel Prize, nor is his nonappearance at the ceremony a protest in service of some issue that Bob Dylan cares about and Patti Smith embodies. But Patti Smith will stand in for Bob Dylan at the Nobel Prize event next week.

Sacheen Littlefeather reference video:

"I wanted her to react humiliated. I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn't tell her... to obtain something I think you have to be completely free."

"I didn't want Maria to act her humiliation, her rage, I wanted her to Maria to feel ... the rage and humiliation. Then she hated me for all of her life."

Bernardo Bertolucci confirms what the actress Maria Schneider said about the filming of the "butter" scene in "Last Tango in Paris." Schneider is dead now, as is Marlon Brando, who was 48 when Schneider was 19, and he and Bertolucci conspired to surprise her and extract "her reaction as a girl, not as an actress."

"I'm a white, middle-class guy from London - I'm as shocked [at getting cast to play Michael Jackson] as you might be."

Said Joseph Fiennes.

"It's a light comedy look. It's not in any way malicious. It's actually endearing. And the more I actually looked at Michael - it's great, as an actor, to have so much to copy and look at in interviews - the more I kind of fell in love with him....

"Michael and two of his best buddies, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando, happened to be in New York the night before 9/11. It was a concert Michael was giving, and Brando was introducing him on stage. I don't know if this is an urban legend or if it's true, but the three of them couldn't get out because air space was shut down, so the three of them jumped in a car and went on a road trip."

Here's the 2011 Vanity Fair article by Sam Kashner, about the real-life road trip and I'm going to get off the interstate that is the topic of the outrage of casting a white actor to play a black person when there aren't enough roles for black actors (and whether any black actors look as much like Michael Jackson as Joseph Fiennes does, if he does) and I'm taking the off-ramp that is the actual story of the road trip:

"People, people this isn't even my dog, I found this picture on fascistbook, stole it, and decided to use it in a prank to fool these religitards."

"So I did, and low and behold idiots left and right fall for it, and those that didn't, seem to think they have a superior intelligence or something, for pointing out the obvious. Keep in mind, I never told a single soul to like this, that is their choice, I don't give a f*ck either way."

The originator of badly-burned/ham-on-face dog explains himself and is quoted at Snopes, which gives a big FALSE to the rumor that the dog's face was burned.

Discussed yesterday on this blog at "Millions Of Prayers Go Out To Dog Afflicted With Ham On Face."

ADDED: The expression is "lo and behold," not "low and behold." It's a Bob Dylan song, "Lo and Behold":

“What’s the matter, Molly, dear? What’s the matter with your mound?”
“What’s it to ya, Moby Dick? This is chicken town!”
Lo and behold! Lo and behold! Lookin’ for my lo and behold
Get me outa here, my dear man!

AND: "Lo" is a very old interjection, going all the way back to "Beowulf." It just means look. So "lo and behold" means look and see.  Here's how Tennessee Williams used it in "Streetcar Named Desire":

"You come in here and sprinkle the place with powder and spray perfume and cover the light-bulb with a paper lantern, and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile!"

Now just say that in your best Marlon Brando voice. Put some ham on your face and talk like Marlon Brando.

"I just saw the whole Back to the Future trilogy in the theater."

My son John blogs:

Well, that was fun. The Back to the Future movies are probably better enjoyed one at a time than back to back....

The first and the second each end with a to-be-continued cliffhanger which is supposed to be fun because you have to wait.

I never once felt like leaving and finishing the rest some other time by watching the DVDs I have at home. It was the most enthusiastic movie audience I've ever been part of — people applauded and hooted not only during various climactic moments, but also when the time machine and Doc first appeared, the first time one of the characters said the words "back to the future," and of course, when Doc said "October 21, 2015."

There are some live-theater experiences that cannot be had at home.

At one point, Back to the Future Part III stopped in the middle... Audience members called out things like: "You've disrupted the space-time continuum!" "Not enough jigowatts!"

I love stuff like that... much as I hate the malfunctions. I was once in some little theater in Greenwich Village that was showing the Marlon Brando movie "The Fugitive Kind" — "Val Xavier, a drifter of obscure origins arrives at a small town and... is pursued by Carol Cutere..." Marlon and Carol/Joanne Woodward are tooling along in a sportscar and she's saying: "I'm just a lewd vagrant, and I'm gonna show 'em, and show 'em all, just how lewd a lewd vagrant can be, when she puts her whole heart into it, the way I do mine," and then she suddenly points off screen and says: "Hey, turn off here." Immediately, the film malfunctions and shuts down, as if the projectionist had taken "Hey, turn off here" as an order. I've never been simultaneously so amazed and annoyed.