Entertainers Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo parachute into the jungles of the Pacific island of Cola-Cola, where they meet primitive tribesmen, the chief's sarong-clad daughter Nona, and mad scientist Dr. Zabor (Bela Lugosi) conducting experiments in evolution. A newspaper editor uses every trick in the book to keep his ace reporter ex.
The Los Angeles Film Festival may have come to the end of its days after its final edition last fall, the TCM Classic Film Festival wrapped its 10th year last month, and AFI Fest waits until Oscar season to trot out contenders. But now the town has a brand new festival of a very different stripe, and it is taking place right in the heart of Hollywood., the brainchild of famed film critic and historian, his daughter Jessie (who pitched the idea to her dad) and wife Alice, is set to launch its first edition at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood on Friday, and it will be running all weekend. It is sort of the West Coast answer to the venerable EbertFest in Chicago, which the late Pulitzer Prize-winning critic started to largely honor overlooked films he admired (it has been carried on in style by Ebert’s widow Chazz). Related StoryMaltin’s three-day festival promises to be a film lovers’ delight on its own terms including pristine and vintage prints of movies he has admired and loved over the years — largely independent gems that deserved more attention and are getting it now.
Who better than Maltin to put them all together on a Mothers Day weekend (anyone who buys a pass can take along their mother for free) where it looks like there is something for everybody, from Alexander Payne’s early gem to a black-and-white 1952 curio that falls into the “so bad it’s good” category, and clearly a Maltin guilty pleasure as he told me when I hopped on the phone with him.“Our closing night attraction is Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, a uniquely terrible movie for which I have great affection,” he said. “It turns out I’m not alone, judging from the response we’ve gotten. Aside from the imposing Mr. Lugosi it stars Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, who were the poor man’s Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis — when Dean and Jerry were the hottest act in show business. And the Academy is loaning us a 35mm print that was donated to their collection by Bela Lugosi Jr.”As for the movies you would expect an esteemed film critic to present in this kind of forum, they are all on hand as well, getting one more chance in the limelight of an historic movie palace’s projection booth (one of the few not showing Avengers: Endgame.)“Every critic I know likes to champion underdog movies that haven’t found the audience they deserve.
This is my chance to program a whole weekend of such films, which I think of as hidden gems,” Maltin told me. “The filmmakers are grateful to get their movies back on a theater screen, which is why Alexander Payne and Laura Dern ( Citizen Ruth), Nicole Holofcener ( Please Give), Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski ( Big Eyes), Phil Rosenthal ( Exporting Raymond) and Holly K.
Payne ( The Death of ‘Superman Lives’ – What Happened?) are happy to participate,” he added of just some of the notables who will be on hand. “Director Maggie Greenwald couldn’t join us but she sent her personal 35mm print of, a perfect example of a movie that slipped through the cracks—even after winning a Special Jury Prize for its Acting Ensemble at Sundance.”. Maltin, who among his other activities teaches a popular film course at USC where he shows prerelease movies but peppers the experience for students with vintage shorts and cartoons, promises to do the same thing for each of the attractions at MaltinFest. “It’s my way of injecting a dollop of film history into the proceedings. We’ve gotten wonderful cooperation from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Warner Bros, Paramount and Universal to show these shorts in 35mm,” he said.
Director Joe Dante, who once cast Maltin in an unflattering version of himself in a Gremlins 2 cameo, will be on hand co-hosting the podcast he does with Josh Olson called “Trailers From Hell Presents The Movies That Made Me,” and there will be book signings and other bonuses as well.The prime opening-night film on Friday will be one most people probably missed when it came out: director John Carney’s 2016 coming-of-age movie, which I loved just as much as Maltin. It made my Ten Best Films list that year and is not to be missed. And just to show how cutting edge this fest is turning out to be, Deadline just coincidentally reported that the film is following the path of Carney’s classic Oscar-winning Once and being turned into a Broadway musical, aimed to debut off-Broadway in the same venue where the eight-time Tony-winning Once started.MaltinFest information and tickets can be found.Subscribe to and keep your inbox happy.
As the family is out of the house this evening, I’ve decided to just lay here on the couch, in front of the fireplace, and study up on Jerry Lewis look-alike, the star of. That’s as the gorilla above. As I seriously doubt that any of you would enjoy the trip down that particular rabbit hole, though, here’s something that you might want to discuss in my absence. Yesterday, on Fox News, Mitch McConnell said that he would not be bringing the bipartisan bill to protect Robert Mueller to the floor of the Senate for a vote. “I’m the one who decides what we take to the floor,” the Majority Leader said.
Posted April 19, 2018 at 6:21 am Hannah Arendt posited that the difference between tyranny and totalitarianism is that tyranny forces ideas upon people, whereas totalitarianism doesn’t force opinions on people but ‘robs them of the very ability to form opinions.’“If this practice of totalitarianism is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms.” — On Totalitarianism. Posted April 19, 2018 at 6:46 am “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.”― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (again). Posted April 19, 2018 at 8:34 am CNN: Pittsburgh police ordered to bring riot gear in case Trump fires Mueller“Pittsburgh police ordered its detectives to bring riot gear to work Thursday in anticipation of protests should President Donald Trump fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller.Police Cmdr. Victor Joseph reportedly sent an email Wednesday, instructing Major Crimes detectives to bring full uniforms and riot gear to work “until further notice.”In the internal memo obtained by local media, Joseph said “there is a belief” Mueller may be fired, and “large-scale” protests are expected in the central business district within 24 hours if it happens.”. Posted April 19, 2018 at 10:23 am All those fools who were screaming about tyranny during the Obama years over health care and gay wedding cakes are suddenly silent when a true would be tyrant takes the helm, undermines our most crucial institutions and brings us into a true Constitutional crisis.This is an unbelievable time we live in.
I figured that we’d wrangle over abortion and cakes and insurance forever, but never thought we’d see the day when the Republican party gathers together to keep a true fool in office at the expense of the most basic American ideals. Posted April 19, 2018 at 10:50 am Yes, IL. My father, who grew up during WW2, is obsessed with US history and bought the American ideal whole-heartedly for most of his life, now believes he lived too long.
He is bereft. But he has also attended his first protest. I now hope he lives long enough to see the pendulum swing in the other direction. Still, to see what the GOP has become slowly over time, since Reagan, is truly disheartening.If you look at Obama’s policies and approach, they line up pretty neatly with Nixon’s, minus the paranoic madness of course.
Posted April 19, 2018 at 12:45 pm Washington Post: “Only a smattering of Republicans are willing to keep tabs on Trump”The new group Republicans for the Rule of Law is out with its second ad seeking to head off President Trump from firing either special counsel Robert S. Mueller III or Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein:Sarah Longwell, one of the group’s founders and a longtime Republican activist, wrote in an op-ed for the Hill:“Firing Mueller, Rosenstein or Attorney General Jeff Sessions would be a fundamental blow to the rule of law in the United States. It would resemble what happens in developing countries that lack checks and balances on executive power, and where leaders can depose those who threaten them.”“Beyond legal and constitutional considerations, it’s in the political self-interest of Republicans to protect the special counsel’s investigation. Democratic enthusiasm is already at a record high, and Democrats are already outpolling Republicans in primary elections by 7 percentage points. A Quinnipiac poll released last week finds massive public opposition to firing Mueller — and that even Republicans oppose firing Mueller by more than a two-to-one margin.
If Trump goes down that path, a standard first term congressional swing election would likely be transformed into a Democratic landslide.”Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has decreed that no bill protecting Mueller would reach the Senate floor on his watch. “What McConnell has done is actually worse than not passing the Mueller protection legislation,” said Ian Bassin, the executive director of the nonpartisan Protect Democracy. “By slamming the door shut so definitively, he’s basically inviting Trump to cross the Rubicon by promising not to stand in the way.” He added: “I can think of only two reasons McConnell would do this: either he doesn’t care about the rule of law and the Constitution; or perhaps, just maybe, he knows like everyone else does that Trump firing Mueller would mark the end of the Trump presidency, and McConnell is baiting him to do it because privately he too can’t stand Trump.”However, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) is plowing ahead with consideration of the Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act, sponsored by Sens. Graham (R-S.C.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). “They got together, so I feel an obligation to keep my word and move forward,” said Grassley, according to The Hill.
“But I can’t worry about what’s going on on the floor. I’ve just got to do what I can do.”What a quaint notion — one senator gives his word and keeps it, a group of bipartisan senators act to protect a shared interest in protecting the rule of law, and an outside group of concerned Republicans puts aside partisanship to urge their party act based on “enlightened self-interest and the country’s well-being” as Longwell put it. It is a commendable display of participatory democracy that we badly need.Even if the Senate bill does not pass, it is critical for the country to see which Republicans actually do believe in the rule of law so they can be held accountable on Election Day. That, too, is how democracies are supposed to work.
(Interestingly, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who sits on the Judiciary Committee recently polled a scant 3 points ahead of his Democratic challenger, Rep. Beto O’Rourke.)Meanwhile, over in the House, six GOP congressmen have signed on to legislation to protect Mueller. Politico reports:“At least six House Republicans have endorsed the legislation in the past week, including three on Tuesday, despite a new round of assurances from Speaker Paul Ryan that the effort is unnecessary. A handful of others told Politico they’re open to the proposal but are still evaluating it.”Sadly, three of those six are retiring — Reps. Charlie Dent and Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania and Florida’s Ileana Ros-Lehtinen — once more demonstrating that winning in the Republican Party is incompatible with those who refuse to carry water for Trump.It would be interesting to hear why Speaker Paul D.
Ryan (R-Wis.) thinks this is unnecessary. What assurance could Trump possibly give (if he gave one at all) that would not be subject to revision or repudiation? Ryan insults his members’ intelligence by insisting there is no risk Trump will induce a constitutional crisis.The country should be heartened to see some veteran congressional Republicans, as well as some elected lawmakers, defy the president in defense of the rule of law. We should, however, be terribly dismayed about how few there are, and how out of step they are with the GOP base and congressional leadership.Read more:. Posted April 19, 2018 at 5:22 pm Giuliani just joined Trump’s legal team to ‘negotiate an end to the investigation with Mueller.As though that’s how a damned FBI investigation works. They don’t get settled. They get completed.
This isn’t a civil suit.It seems Big G is trying to prevent Trump from firing Mueller. But mueller doesn’t care. This is the FBI, with or without Mueller the investigation continues. They don’t do politics. For a reason as we learned recently.Maybe Big G will convince Trump to turn himself in ha!
Just a stalling measure. He must be doing someone a big favor. Posted April 20, 2018 at 10:37 am The notion that Americans will quietly accept totalitarianism must be driven from the conversation. Maybe complacent boomer liberals would have that reaction, but the young progressives who’ve yet to attain economic stability have nothing to lose.
IF Mueller fails, if midterms fail, if marches fail, then you all better get used to the idea that we may have to actually fight to preserve our legacy for humanity, flawed as it may be.The right has succeeded in stealing working class whites partly by appealing to what I’ve come to think of as “the conviction gap”. They may be wrong as hell about guns, race, religion, etc., but by god they are willing to fight and die (and kill libtards) for what they believe. And they want to be on a side that shares that sense of conviction. So us smarty pants intellectualizers had best not lose touch with our own primitive survival instincts or the future will not think kindly of us.“non-violent resistance only works if your opponent has a conscience” – Stokely Carmicheal.
Posted April 20, 2018 at 1:37 pm The Alt-right is flailing lately. They failed to attract the non-violent working class Whites they intended to and Spencer et al have been stymied by mostly non-violent but disruptive Anifa efforts. They are delegitimized. That doesn’t mean that individuals in that crowd don’t represent a threat to other individuals and groups, but they can not organize any kind of meaningful political effort as they have in Europe (thank the two-party system for that here) And they have failed to accrue more followers. I think we all are prepared to take a stand against totalitarianism. And the best defense of totalitarianism is functional liberal democratic systems, not rebellion. All that said, should things get worse, I believe enough Americans will demand change in the many ways we can do that, to make it happen.
Let’s not give up hope on the midterms to turn the tide on Trump’s power and revitalize the left with a bunch of new progressive candidates. The Alt Right is not gaining power. I think history will show they reached peak power Nov 9th 2016 and it will prove to be all downhill from there.
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