Watched STATE'S ATTORNEY (1932) based on the recommendation of @NitrateDiva and LORD ALMIGHTY JOHN BARRYMORE IS WILDING
Bachelor mob lawyer Barrymore defends hooker Helen Twelvetrees, shacks up with her, then switches to prosecutor and goes straight but keeps Twelvetrees
UNTIL
Barrymore's political ambitions put him in circles with society gal Lilian Ulrich, who tells him she had a serious relationship at nineteen, and when he asks how serious her response is to *whisper*
to which he replies, "That makes things much easier!"
cut to: a parked car
headlights pass as they sit up and she talks a drunk Barrymore into going to find a judge or the mayor and get married
which they do
Barrymore then goes to tell Twelvetrees and then elects to sleep it off at a bachelor hotel
a frustrated Ulrich can't get him out of the bachelor hotel so goes home...
...where she hooks up with his until-then competitor Raul Rollen, whose character is a celebrated Spanish tenor!
The tenor shows up at the hotel to announce he is here for his honor, and that he has been walking all night in the park
BARRYMORE. "...for your honor?"
that would be a 1932 joke about gay cruising
The tenor confesses that he loves Barrymore's wife and Barrymore agrees to an annulment -- he doesn't like divorce but annulment is fine! -- and he promises the tenor the wife is untouched
which, I guess is TECHNICALLY true
*as a wife* she is
EXCEPT ADULTEROUSLY BY THE TENOR
but it is WILD what pre-code movies could get away with
Barrymore *absolutely* banged this gal, but it was BEFORE they got married (by like twenty minutes), so it doesn't count and annulling the marriage is a-okay and still within 1932 standards
DIRECTOR. "Sure audiences will be okay with that?"
SCREENWRITER. "It'll be fine! Sure, the bluenoses'll kick, but what can they do?"
WILL H. HAYS.
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I always complain that movie & TV sets these days are too aspirational lifestyle
e.g. RED DRAGON (2002) vs. MANHUNTER (1986) — Ed Norton & William Petersen as same dude w/ same job in same story; compare their houses (MH left, RD right) — but I rewatched & it's more than that
RED DRAGON doesn’t just have sets that are bigger or fancier or more expensive: even its spaces with few people are deeper
for example, this police briefing scene, with shots of the speakers and of the crowd (MANHUNTER left, RED DRAGON right)
here is another: the bad guy’s living room (MANHUNTER left, RED DRAGON right)
final verdict on TRUE DETECTIVE S4: just ok, a bit clunky, and the reveal doesn't work on a character level (ie, motivations don't make sense bc ppl's actions require access to information they have no reason to be privy to)
so it got me thinking: what makes TRUE DETECTIVE work?
on my recent TRUE DETECTIVE rewatch I started making notes about what I felt the essence of TRUE DETECTIVE was and what made it work
not a formula, but a vibe and ground rules that I would look to if for some reason HBO asked me of all people to create a season of TRUE DETECTIVE
or, put another way: of the stuff that made TRUE DETECTIVE: S1 compelling TV, what can you replicate without making it feel like a retread?
reminder that when the Gaetz venmo scandal was wall to wall journos were swearing the guy who got arrested would imminently drop indisputable proof that Gaetz was banging a minor
that dude never dropped it, couldn’t deliver Gaetz to prosecutors, and went to prison
I think it’s fair to say that everybody on both sides of the aisle was prepared to believe Gaetz did sleazy stuff, but wanted to see the goods
and the goods never dropped when they could have saved an involved party from prison, so I expect this is bs
here is an amazing anecdote I heard from somebody who has been in Cameroon
it is about money
or rather, the lack of it
petty corruption is *extremely* common in Cameroon; if you are a foreigner (or of a different local ethnicity than the officer) cops will straight-up demand a bribe to let you move on
in US currency:
typical sidewalk bribe: $3.50
typical speeding ticket bribe: $20
the government is doing a poor job of rooting this out, in part because they are all too busy collecting bribes
so busy, in fact, they have neglected a different and more hilarious problem
the media using these goons as a club to hammer normal righties does not mean that that is their most important function as far as they (the goons) are concerned
do not mistake what concerns you for the function; this ain't about you
rule of thumb when you're looking at radical groups is: figure out which groups in question you're dealing with, and here you're dealing with a couple different but aligned ones
they're called a) Blood Tribe and b) Goyim Defense League
My brain has needed a break lately so my bedtime reading book of the last couple of nights was Peter Benchley's JAWS and it made me realize some new things about movie adaptations of books
I better understand Benchley's grumbles about the changes and why they were made
there are some famous changes made from book to screen in JAWS but the root of them is a change nobody talks about: genre
probably because JAWS (the novel) is a genre that really doesn't exist anymore; I'm not sure it was even named but I call it "the way-it-works novel"
the way-it-works novel is best understood as a forerunner of the technothriller
a technothriller (type specimen: THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER) explains the ins-and-outs of a world unfamiliar to the reader and sets an adventure there