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Marilyn’s Desert Island Eight – Movies I never tire of!

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Eight movies to have on a desert island? So many movies … but if I had to make the choice, here they are!

The Lion In Winter

The Lion in Winter (1968 film)

The Lion in Winter (1968 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Awesome performances by everyone, from Hepburn and O’Toole, to Anthony Hopkins in his first screen role. Wonderful script and matchless screen chemistry. It’s not accurate history … but the interaction of the members of the family is surprisingly close if you want to examine only the emotional content. In the end, it’s all about the performances. From top to bottom, every performance is extraordinary. Hepburn got an Oscar, one of three wins for the film. Many more nominations plus three Golden Globes. All well-deserved.

The Americanization of Emily

Cover of "The Americanization of Emily"

Paddy Chayevsky‘s script is among the best movie scripts of all time. Add superb performances by James Garner and Julie Andrews in her first dramatic role. The whole movie would be worth it just for Garner’s monologue on war. But there’s so much more. It’s funny, sharp, downright brilliant.

The cast knew they’d never have a better job. All of them list this movie as the favorite or as one of the top one or two of their professional lives. Roles like this don’t come along often in any actor’s career. The actors showed their appreciation by working their hearts out. Everyone is at the top of his or her game.

Tombstone

This is one of those movies that I like better each time I watch it … and I watch it often. We can recite dialogue with it. It’s got everything you want a western to have: passion, revenge, violence, humor and brilliant cinematography. It’s Val Kilmer‘s best performance and arguably Kurt Russell‘s shining moment.

This is my go to movie if I need a revenge and violence fix. It manages to have a satisfying body count without the gore. I like that in a movie.

Maybe it isn’t one of the all time greatest films, but reminds me of some of the best of times in my life as well as music I dearly love. It’s funny, often laugh-out-loud hilarious, a loving parody. It’s a warm-hearted and nostalgic look at a time many of us look back on with great affection. The music manages to be humorous and good — a difficult act to pull off.

Casablanca

Not the most original choice, but it’s so good and it has worn well despite the years. We saw it on the big screen not long ago. Wonderful. It’s pure mythology, but it’s the way we wish it had been. I need heroes.

Three Oscar wins — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay plus nominations for just about every member of the cast. Seeing it on the big screen was like seeing it for the first time and gave me an even better appreciation of the brilliant script.

Blazing Saddles

It’s hard to pick just one Mel Brooks movie, but if I have to choose, this has to be the one. It was a tough choice. “Young Frankenstein,” “High Anxiety,” and “History of the World, Part I” are right up there too. “Blazing Saddles” wins because it’s got some of the all-time great movie lines. That’s HEDLEY Lamar!

Starman

Science fiction movies usually disappoint me because they aren’t science fiction, but westerns in space using spacecraft for horses, featuring millions of dollars of special effects, but no script. This is all acting. A fine script, wonderful performances, romantic, touching and believable. A great performance — underrated — by Jeff Bridges. And I almost forgot to mention the haunting score. Rarely mentioned, it’s the best kind of science fiction … concept and character based. And unforgettable.

The Three and Four Musketeers (1973 – 1974)

I know they were issued as two movies, but they were filmed as one. The stars of the film(s) sued the studios since they had only been paid for one movie, and they won. Nonetheless, both movies play like a single film in two parts. You can’t watch one without the other. They keep remaking it, but none of the others come near this version. It’s fast, funny, and surprisingly true to the books. Dumas would have been pleased. I love the sword fights. I used to fence in college, and this has some of the best choreographed fencing I’ve ever seen. It’s not the elegant fencing you usually see, but brawling — the way men really fought — not to get points for good form, but to win without getting sliced up.

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And that’s my eight. If I could pick a hundred more, I wouldn’t run out of choices. Oh, and I might change my mind tomorrow!

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Gazing through to the other side: Hollywood and Moral Character

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Blitzen Trapper

When I got 1000 hits in about half an hour, I knew that they must be rebroadcasting this season’s premier episode of Criminal Minds. I’ve written close to 1000 posts, but this is the only one that gets that kind of response.

So, it must be the perfect time to re-post this piece. The question is whether or not the plot used in the premier show of season 8 of “Criminal Minds” is based on a song by a group named Blitzen Trapper, whose lead singer/lyricist is Eric Earley. This comes up each time the show airs, which is how come I get all these hits on that post.

To settle the issue once and for all — or until the show airs again — one of my correspondents is a producer on Criminal Minds. He assures me the group is being compensated and nothing underhanded is going on. I’m grateful to discover things are not as bad as they seem. It’s so rare. Usually, whatever is going on, things are worse than I imagined possible.

A screenshot of the BAU Team on the jet.

A screenshot of the BAU Team on the jet. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails from people who seem otherwise intelligent yet against all reason believe big corporations would never take advantage of “little people,” and certainly would never commit (gasp) plagiarism. What makes this belief bizarre is that the corporations under discussion are run for and by people in show business. Unless my correspondents are living on a different planet than me, why would they think this? Have these people displayed such high moral character that they are incapable of illegal or immoral behavior? Could anyone be that naïve?

Apparently yes.

Corporations spend millions of dollars on public relations and advertising campaigns designed to convince us that they have our best interests at heart. They are entitled to give it their best shot, but why would anyone actually believe them? How has any corporation ever shown itself  to be on any side but its own? And show business folks? These are not people famous for moral turpitude. Plagiarism is ridiculously commonplace. I don’t know a writer with hopes of breaking into “the business” who hasn’t had a piece of work stolen. Here’s how it works.

You go for an interview. You bring your story idea, your script, manuscript, lyrics, arrangement, proposal, whatever. You present it to the person to whom you hope to sell it. You make your pitch, praying this is the big score you’ve been waiting for. Alas, it is another rejection. You’re used to rejection. It comes with the territory.

A few months later, a new television series is introduced that has an identical storyline to the one you were trying to sell to that very production studio. A few relatively minor details have been altered, but you recognize it and so do all your friends.

Wathcha gonna do, eh? You’re going to sue the studio? Take the network to court? Bring suit against the record label? You have that kind of money and clout? If you were pitching your material, you are probably broke. They’ve got armies of lawyers. You’ve got your paycheck and tips from waiting on tables while you try to finish your next piece. Only in the Bible does David win. Goliath wins in the real world.

There is a great deal of plagiarism in television and movies, so much that the relevant lawsuits rarely make the news any more.

In the software world, accusations of intellectual property theft have reached the point where, after endless legal battles between Microsoft and Apple, every major manufacturer is suing every other manufacturer for copyright infringement. Who wins? Since everyone steals from everyone else and everyone is guilty to some extent, the winner is the company with the best lawyers or the most political influence. And of course, who paid off who.

Oh no, that doesn’t happen, you cry! Our legal system can’t be bought and sold. Right. And the tooth fairy left you a buck under your pillow last night. No really, she did. Honest! My congressman told me, so it must be true.

Public servants are as honest as the day is long. Corporations care about you and me. Hollywood and television executives are persons of the highest moral character. The moon is made of green cheese. Tomorrow I’m going to sprout wings and fly.

In this case, I believe my source, that Blitzen Trapper is being duly compensated and the worst crime involved is bad scriptwriting, which is not illegal, though it ought to be. The writers assumed the audience would not Google the song lyric within the first 10 seconds after the show’s characters said “there’s no reference to it anywhere.” Obviously they think we the audience are incompetent and stupid. It’s infuriating but it’s not against the law. Yet.

Just when I’m getting on my high horse about how we aren’t as dumb as they think we are, I get letters from readers proving that a lot of people may really be that dumb, or at least that naïve. I find this scary. Hell, these people are allowed to vote!

My signature line on email uses the following quote: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” – Robert Hanlon

In this case, for this show, I may have attributed to malice that which was in fact adequately explained by stupidity. That’s their excuse, but what excuse do you have for believing propaganda paid for by people who would squash you like a bug without a second thought?

I don’t get it. Maybe someone can explain it to me,

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Where’s the story? Why some things are news but other stuff isn’t

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In case you’ve failed to notice, the importance of something going on in the world has an inverse relationship to the amount of attention it gets in the press. By “press,” I’m not referring only to newspapers, radio, television, or newer sources like social networks, websites and blogs. I mean all of it plus the other stuff — newsletters, email — the collective dissemination of information from a wide variety of perspectives. If you care about truth and facts, you have a lot of ways to find it.

newspaper1

The current definition of “news” is what news organization say it is. Whether or not this actually is the news is an entirely different subject. The control of news content is not, as many people seem to think, in the hands of reporters or even editors and publishers. Control lives in corporate boardrooms run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, people who have no interest in keeping us informed. It’s all about power, politics and money. Mostly money. It’s business, not public service.

I’m not sure when the news stopped having to do with “what’s new (subtext: important)” and became “what corporate suits think people will watch and make them buy our sponsors’ products.” To a degree, that has always been a part of the news business. For a brief shining period from the mid 1940s through the early 196os and perhaps a bit beyond, the “Ed Murrow” effect was a powerful influence in American news. Reporters were invigorated by getting some respect for their work and tried to be “journalists” rather than muckrakers.

cropped-75-turk_073.jpg

People my age grew up at the end of that era. Walter Cronkite was The Man. He carried such an aura of honesty and authority, I thought he should be president not merely of the U.S., but of the world. Who would have the temerity to argue with Walter Cronkite? He sat next to God in the newsroom and some of us had a sneaking suspicion God personally told him what was important. If Walter said it was True, we believed. Thus when Walter Cronkite became the person to get Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to sit down and talk … the beginning of the Camp David Accords … it seemed natural and right. Highly appropriate. Who was more trustworthy than Uncle Walter? Who carried more authority? He walked in the glow of righteousness.

UncleWalterOld

He always made my mother giggle. It was not Walter, the reporter or man who made her laugh. It was his name. “Cronkite” in Yiddish means ailment, so every time his name was announced, my mother who had a wild and zany sense of humor, was reduced to incoherent choking laughter. It was a nightly event. Eventually she got herself under control sufficiently to watch the news, but the sound of her barely contained merriment did nothing to improve the gravity I felt should surround the news. To this day, the first thing I think of when I hear Walter Cronkite’s name — something that happens with less and less frequency as the younger generations forget everything that happened before Facebook — is the sound of my mother’s laughter. That’s not entirely bad, come to think of it.

What brings this to mind while awaiting what, according to Harvey Leonard, will be the biggest snow storm in 30 or more years, is that Google is stealing our freedom, or at least a good chunk of it, and it’s not on the news at all. No one is  interested.1978

The silence from the press is deafening. Yet this is important and it will affect a lot of people, almost everyone eventually. It’s not another celebrity divorce or trip to rehab. If left unchecked, this is the beginning of the end of the free Internet.

Virtual space is the last truly free thing we have. Everything else is regulated and costs money. Once upon a time, television was free. It wasn’t very good and our TV reception looked like a snowstorm, but the TV was all we needed to access anything on the air. After we bought the television, we had no more TV-related expenses.

Cable brought us nice clear pictures, giant monopolies, and ever-increasing monthly bills to watch television. Cable companies already charge us a hefty monthly fee to hook up to the Internet, so it isn’t really free any more than television is, but it is about to get much worse.

For the past 20 years, communications conglomerates have been looking for a way to capture the Internet and make it pay. More precisely, to make you and me pay for it. It’s the communications mother lode, the last un-mined nature resource for communications moguls. The amount of money to be made by whomever is able to get a lock on the Internet, to charge us for what we currently get free, will make some corporations so rich it makes my head spin thinking about it. All those zeroes!

google-as-a-giant-robot

There’s a gigantic amount at stake here. Not just money, but civil rights, personal freedom, constitutional issues, broad social implications. You name it, this story touches on it. Moreover, a lot of people’s livelihoods are on the line. Many of us make earn our living via the Internet, directly or indirectly. We’ve become so accustomed to shopping online, having friends online, communicating online — living online — we think nothing of it.

What will you do if they take it away? Suddenly you will have to pay your “internet bill” above and beyond whatever you already pay for high-speed connectivity.

Once they get their hooks into you, it’s going to be your cable company all over again. How much do you love your cable company? That much? Hmm. Well, you’re going to love your Internet gatekeepers even more.

Who is involved? Not just Google!

It’s not just Google, though they are the ones currently in play. AT&T and Verizon, Amazon, Microsoft and others are all eyeing the Internet as the next place to make some really big bucks now that the sale of computers is slowing. Hardware is not delivering the kind of profits it once did … time to find a new source. The Internet — cyberspace — could be the mother lode, the biggest financial jackpot in a century. Think of this as Clash of the Titans. The prize is the Internet … and we are in the way. Ouch.

Back to why no one is covering the story

This is a complicated issue. For it to make sense, you need to be familiar with the technology of the Internet, with search engines and their ever-increasing role in information dissemination. There’s a big segment of the population who won’t get it anyhow, no matter how well you explain it because they can’t understand it or don’t want to. Another bunch of people don’t care about anything that isn’t about guns, sports, or in some way related to beer.These folks will be affected, even though they don’t know it, but they don’t want to hear about it. They want to hear about the latest sports or Hollywood scandals and of course, the weather.

google_watching_you_independent_newspaper_24_may_20071

A story likes this requires time, research and patience. Patience to collect information, make it coherent and comprehensible, time to explain it. A newspaper would need to give it considerable space and have someone actually put more than a few seconds into writing it. Add it all together and it spells “just ignore it and maybe it will go away.”

That so much of what we value will probably go with it? Oh well.

People are lazy. I look around and see a lot of lazy, stupid people who have turned themselves to the “off” position. Folks who were once thinking entities have slid into “duh.” Maybe it’s sensory overload, too much stress and non-stop bombardment by crises so when something really important is happening, everyone is tapped out. Too pooped to pop.

Anyway, the story isn’t sexy. It isn’t going to sell beer in the coveted 18 to 45 demographic, so why bother?

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Radio Days – When We Were Young

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Memories, always worth another look.

Garry Armstrong, my charming husband, wanted to be in the movies. His original aim was stardom on the silver screen. Somewhere along the line, he and I and a whole bunch of people we all knew, found our way to the studios of WVHC, the radio station of Hofstra College, now Hofstra University. It was just 10 watts when Garry and I met in the studios. I was 17, Garry was 22. He was a little older than most of the undergrads because at 17, he’d enlisted in the Marines and by the time he got out, a few years had passed.

Gary, me, and President Clinton on Martha’s Vineyard.

He was the Program Director. I was dating the Station Manager, who was, coincidentally, Garry’s best friend, which is where our personal history gets pretty complicated. I was also the Chief Announcer.  I knew that I wanted print, not electronic media, but the radio station was a great place for those of us who had never found a place where we fit in.

Hofstra University logo flag, used in Hofstra ...

Hofstra University logo flag,

We were all oddballs, variously talented, and pretty much all of us went on to have careers in media and the arts. We turned out a couple of authors, quite a few audio engineers, a variety of talk show hosts, DJs, TV and radio producers, several news directors, a bunch of commercial writers (in which group I fall), a  college professor (maybe two, I’m not sure) … and Garry, the only one of us who became a successful TV reporter. Garry’s career spanned 45 years, 31 of them at Channel 7 in Boston.

Surprisingly little footage of Garry’s on the air career has survived and until today, we had nothing at all from his years at ABC Network. Today, a friend of Garry’s found this footage from 1969, the last year Garry was at ABC before he made the jump to television and working in front of the camera. It’s a promotional piece for ABC News and it features a lot of faces and voices from the past … and one young up and coming fellow, Garry Armstrong.

Let us return to those days of yesteryear, when television cameras used film and there was a war in Vietnam. It was 1969, the year my son was born, the year of Woodstock, the end of an era, the beginning of everything else.

This is how it was, back then. Tape recorders that used tape. I used to know how to edit tape. I bet if you gave me an editing block, tape and a razor blade,  I could still do it.

Look at the state-of-the-art equipment circa 1969. The equipment may be antiquated by today’s standards, but the standards by which the news was gathered and reported were incomparably superior to what passes for news reportage today.

As I Went Down In The River To Pray

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See on Scoop.it – Movies From Mavens

As I Went Down In The River To Pray, Northern Ambassadors Choir and more … See on euzicasa.wordpress.com

Some wonderful music and  a great video clip from one of my favorite movies, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).