"Women understand and respond to one another more quickly than do men.... To tinge a whole company of pretty women with a certain amount of ill-humor, it is enough for just one prettier woman to arrive on the scene--especially when there is but one man present"--The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Dirty Harry (to his new partner): "I hope your college degree doesn't get you killed, because I might get killed with you."
Thursday night I tried to screen Zhang Yimou's To Live at Debi's place for the History Meetup. But the subtitles wouldn't play, and about a third of the way through it got completely unplayable! Pity, it's a wonderful movie...
Yesterday afternoon I saw with Dawna Don Siegel's Nixonite vigilante classic Dirty Harry, which made Clint Eastwood a star in America. (He was already the top star overseas!) To call it a caricature is putting it mildly: in the last third it becomes a full-fledged cartoon! The villain, out to extort money from the city government, assassinates random people, then says he has a girl buried alive, then gets released on a technicality, then pays someone to beat him up so he can say Eastwood did it and stop the latter's surveillance, then takes a school bus hostage. It's the sort of movie where Eastwood's watching for the villain through binoculars and ends up seeing naked women who haven't closed their curtains. (I'd thought that Animal House invented that cliche!) Never a dull moment, I'll admit.
Yesterday afternoon I saw with Dawna Don Siegel's Nixonite vigilante classic Dirty Harry, which made Clint Eastwood a star in America. (He was already the top star overseas!) To call it a caricature is putting it mildly: in the last third it becomes a full-fledged cartoon! The villain, out to extort money from the city government, assassinates random people, then says he has a girl buried alive, then gets released on a technicality, then pays someone to beat him up so he can say Eastwood did it and stop the latter's surveillance, then takes a school bus hostage. It's the sort of movie where Eastwood's watching for the villain through binoculars and ends up seeing naked women who haven't closed their curtains. (I'd thought that Animal House invented that cliche!) Never a dull moment, I'll admit.
What's depressing about movies like this isn't just that they're transparently manipulative. (Dedicating the movie to San Francisco policemen killed in action was especially shameless!) It's that people are so easy to manipulate, at least in America. Just like those Jell-o Pudding Pops commercials where Bill Cosby says in a smarmy voice, "Mom won't give you the Evil Eye because it's made of real pudding!" Then they show a pair of motherly hands mixing the pudding and adding milk from a pitcher. We all know it's made in some factory and filled with sugar and fat and exotic chemicals, but American moms have a vague image of pudding as "wholesome."
Twitter is a first-class time-waster! I've been following every tweeter they suggest just in case any of them comes up with something interesting...
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