happy zmedsday!! (lxii)

happy tunesday! ("how do you do" by mouth and macneal)

I'd never heard of Mouth and MacNeal until last Saturday night. They're kind of interesting in a 1970's way. And they are quite a contrast.

cinema history class: the naked witch

Session: Babes with Bodies that Kill, Week 1
Movie: The Naked Witch (1961)
Directed by Larry Buchanan & Claude Alexander

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Researching his thesis about local superstitions and folklore, a college student digs up and frees a witch who then goes skinny-dipping. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:

This had a reasonably good, though arguably cliche, storyline. And it was reasonably coherent. But everything about the production betrayed its cheapness.

For starters, it was very short -- under an hour. And within that hour, there was a lot of filler. It started with several minutes of narration with the camera scanning over a Bosch-like painting of demons and witches. I'd say the extended skinny-dipping sequence was filler but if the main goal of the movie was to show nudity then, well, that sequence should have been longer. Of course, if you're watching this movie for nudity, you're gonna be disappointed. Maybe in 1961 (or 1964, which is when it hit theaters), T&A was harder to come by. The background music was very hit and miss; Sometimes it was spot on, but other times it made it sound like we watching in an ice-skating rink.

I was annoyed by the overuse of narration instead of dialogue. Keith explained that that was a money-saving maneuver. I mean, we're talking about a movie with an $8,000 budget. Even 60 years ago, that was very little.

We did discuss that there were little things that could have made the film much better without costing a lot. For example, it's never really explained why the student (he's never actually given a name) digs the witch up. They could have added some pantomime to indicate that, looking at her grave, he was overcome by some unseen mind-control (presumably from the witch herself). He looks at the grave, then turns away. Then he pauses and turns back. Then away. Then back at the grave he falls to his knees and starts digging. That would have made the whole sequence better. But they never did pay me to help write it, so...

I ended up being of a mixed mind. I really wanted to like this more than I did. And I wanted to pan it more than it deserved. In the end I gave it a kind of middling rating.

Ratings:

Me: 6
Dave: 9.2
Ethan: 3

democratic candidates 2020

UPDATED: I corrected a typo. Originally, the paragragph on Bloomberg said "Bernie" instead of "Bloomberg."

As the political season gets underway, I figure it's time for me to give my in-depth rundown of the men and women fighting for the Democratic nomination. Rather than try to cover all 4,581 of these candidates, I'll limit myself to the six who have something approaching a realistic chance of getting the nomination.

Joe Biden
The interesting thing about Joe Biden is that you can build his last name up from a one-letter word using the following rules:
1) start with a one letter word (it has to be a real English word, which means either "a" or "i";
2) add a letter either at the beginning of or at the end of the word you have, creating either a legitimate Scrabble word or the candidate's name;
3) If step 2 gave you the candidate's name, you're done. Otherwise, repeat step 2.

In the case of Biden, the successive words are: i, id, bid, bide, biden.

There have been five presidents whose names can be built up like that, none of whom were twentieth-century presidents. I also note that I am including Obama in that list, which depends on using the word "bama," which seems to be an insulting slang term for an unsophisticated hick -- derived from "Alabama." I doubt that "bama" is in the Scrabble dictionary, but I'm relying on dictionary.com.

Michael Bloomberg
If Bloomberg gets the nomination and wins, he would, at the moment he becomes President, be the oldest president ever -- older than Reagan when he left office. Which also means that, if he gets the nomination, he and Trump will be the two oldest candidates ever.  I guess that's also true of Biden, though I didn't mention it. See above.

Pete Buttigieg
If Buttigieg gets the nomination, then this will be the first time that the two major party candidates each have last names that contain informal terms for a person's backside. So the jokes will be writing themselves. If Buttigieg gets the nomination and wins he will be the youngest president ever. Also, he'd be the first president whose last name has multiple occurrences of three different letters.

Amy Klobuchar
If Klobuchar gets the nomination and wins, then we'd have a president named Amy before we have one named Marc. This is only relevant to me because my sister's name is Amy. I blogged about that a while ago. See here.

Bernie Sanders
See Bloomberg, only older.

Elizabeth Warren
If Warren gets the nomination, she'd be the second woman heading a major party ticket. And if she wins, she'd be the first woman President. I guess that's also true of Klobuchar, though I didn't mention it. See above. Also, Warren would be 71 years old -- the second-oldest major party candidate to ever seek a first term. The oldest was John McCain who was 72 on election day, 2008. And if she wins, she'll be the oldest to assume office.   I guess that's also true of Biden, though I didn't mention it. See above. It's also true of Bloomberg and Sanders and I didn't mention it explicitly. But it's kind of implicit in what I did say about him.

Policy
I have my own opinions about the candidates, their policy positions, suitability for office and which ones are better and which ones are worse. But I'm not interested in getting into all that on the intertubes. Try reading their website or watching debates. Or check out whatever media you trust.

cinema history class: my name is nobody

Session: Bring Your Own Spaghetti Western, Week 4
Movie: My Name Is Nobody (1973)
Directed by Tonino Valerii

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
An old gunslinger wants to retire, but a youngster wants him to go out on top. Hilarity ensues.

Administrative Notes:
It has become a class tradition to do a month of Spaghetti Westerns (or Spaghetti Western-related films) every January. It's a change of pace -- a palate-cleanser, as Keith puts it. This year, because several of us have suggested specific SpagWests, Keith decided to let us each pick one for this month's session. This week was Sean's pick.

Reaction:

Director Tonino Valerii did a good job of creating an homage to the best of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns. It had the breadth and grandeur of those earlier films, and the music of Ennio Morricone. This was just beautiful. It was very much an homage to Leone's films -- which brings it full circle since Leone produced it.

But, while all that's true, it's important to point out that this was also a bit of a parody, with strong comedic elements. And that's the only thing that bothered me about this -- the humor was a little too much at times. There were some points where it descended into Three Stooges territory. Most of the time, the humor wasn't particularly overbearing, but there were moments...

The story itself is a strong one, kind of a variation of the whole "fastest gunman" theme. Arguably combined with a story about an obsessive fan. And Henry Fonda's narration at the end really ties the whole thing together well. 

Ratings:

Me: 9.25
Dave: 9.8
Ethan: 8
Joe: 10
Keith: 9.5
Sean: 4 out of 4