'All That Jazz' is an interesting movie!

 

Thanks again to Bobby Campbell for the above graphic

As you may remember if your memory stretches back a few months, I have launched an effort to watch some of the various movies that Robert Anton Wilson included in his list of his 100 favorite movies.  So far, we've done The Maltese Falcon and Intolerance, and All That Jazz was next. (Click on the "RAW movie club" label on this post for previous installments.)

I apologize for taking so long to get to All That Jazz. I try to only schedule movies that can be watched for free, and after my wife agreed to watch the movie with me, I discovered that it had been temporarily removed by Tubi, the free movie website and app. They did bring it back, and I finally watched it (or rather rewatched it after several decades).

My ex wife loved the movie, as I discovered when I watched it with her decades ago (she liked the catch phrase, "Don't bullshit a bullshitter"), but my wife was more resistant to its charms, calling it "stupid,"  and declined to  finish watching it with me. But I liked the movie. It was directed by Bob Fosse and apparently is at least semi-autobiographical. The viewer realizes that the Fosse character, played by Roy Scheider, is seriously ill after suffering a heart attack and is looking back on his life. I won't go further into the plot. See this Wikipedia article for background.  Fosse himself died of a heart attack. 

Did any of y'all watch the movie? Did you like it?

Speaking of "blog projects," I will post a schedule Monday for the previously announced Moby Dick reading group. I will also soon announce the next RAW movie club movie. 

RAW movie club update: 'All That Jazz'

My last announcement for the RAW movie club, i.e. the ongoing project to watch the movies on Robert Anton Wilson's 100 favorite movies,  has hit a delay. I did mean to watch it earlier, but did not get around to trying to start it until Sunday. Then I found that it was not on Tubi after all. It is currently listed as "coming Sept. 1." I can't find it available for streaming anywhere else in the U.S. I have put the DVD on hold at the local library. 

I'm not sure what I did wrong. Was it there in July or did Tubi take it away for a month? In any event, I will finally watch it one way or another in the next few weeks, blog about it here, and then announce the next movie. 

At least I have plenty of other things to read and watch. I am reading the Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, re-reading Wilson's Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth, rewatching Twin Peaks and will read The Sex Magicians, which I expect will be out soon. 

RAW movie club: All That Jazz

 

Image by Bobby Campbell 

Continuing the project of watching films from Robert Anton Wilson's list of his 100 favorite movies, I have chosen All That Jazz from 1979. for the next film. I wanted something more modern after the two previous old back and white films. And the movie is free on Tubi. I am attempting to pick movies that everyone can watch for free. I'll watch it in the next couple of weeks and do a post.

Previously featured as "RAW movie club" films: The Maltese Falcon and Intolerance. 

RAW Movie Club: The Maltese Falcon

 

Thank you to Bobby Campbell for the illustration. 

The main thing I noticed when I watched "The Maltese Falcon"  (still available free on Tubi) was how fast moving it was, how everything seemed to be almost kind of abrupt. 

About 1:07 in, the captain of a boat comes staggering in to Sam Spade's office, carrying the Maltese falcon he apparently had promised to deliver. Humphrey Bogart's comment, "He couldn't have come far with those holes in him." It seems kind of absurd that someone shot several times would still make a delivery. But the movie has the quality, which I've  noticed in certain books, that things are moving so quickly you don't have time to think about whether the action makes sense. Lots of wisecracks and lots of unexpected twists and turns. 

The Wikipedia article on the film says that the movie originally was offered to George Raft, but it's difficult now to envision the movie without Bogart, who seems to be in pretty much every scene and dominates the film with his tough-but-decent persona. Mary Astor is a confused and confusing beautiful "bad girl." 

I'm a big fan of the 1942 movie "Casablanca," and it's interesting to see two of the actors from that movie (besides Bogart) show up in this one, Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet; as with Bogie, their characters here don't seem wildly dissimilar to their "Casablanca" characters. 

I'll select another movie from RAW's list of his favorite 100 movies and announce it as the new "RAW movie club" movie for July. I'll try to find something else that's available to everyone for free. 

RAW movie club: The Maltese Falcon

Humphrey Bogart (as detective Sam Spade) and Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. 

Continuing my project to watch movies on Robert Anton Wilson's list of his 100 favorite movies, I decided that next I will watch The Maltese Falcon, No. 85 on the list.

RAW writes quite a bit about the Knights of Malta in his books, for example in Coincidance and in Everything Is Under Control, and in Coincidance, he writes that the group "inspired part of the plot of The Maltese Falcon." 

I'll watch the movie in the next couple of weeks and write about it in early June. I wanted to pick something that would not cost anything if anyone else wanted to watch it, too, and it is currently available free on Tubi (with ads), which is the way old people like me used to watch old movies on TV. 

RAW movie club: Intolerance

Scene from Intolerance. Did Babylon really have huge statues of elephants? It sure looks impressive. 

As I mentioned earlier, I had decided to watch Intolerance, listed as Robert Anton Wilson's favorite film, and apparently a movie that influenced Illuminatus! 

It's a really long movie, so I was relieved it turned out to be excellent. The Wikipedia article about the movie lists four different major versions of the public domain film. I watched the Kino version, 197 minutes long, which has a soundtrack. I checked it out from Hoopla. Finding a free version to watch online is not difficult, there's one at the Internet Archive. 

The influence on Illuminatus! apparently consists in the way it uses separate plotlines and switches abruptly from one to the other. There's a modern plot about poor people being abused by the rich and by the system. Another plot depicts the life of Jesus, another shows Belshazzar's Babylon  under attack from the Persians, and another shows the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France in 1572.  The common theme is intolerance, not just religious intolerance, but the kind of intolerance that results in Prohibition and various moral crusades and moral panics. 

I wasn't particularly looking forward to the life of Jesus stuff, and the actor playing The Nazarene, Howard Gaye, is kind of stiff, as if he's affected by the pressure of playing the Son of God. But the scenes from the New Testament are some of the best bits! The wedding at Cana is depicted, with the first miracle of Jesus being an  intervention to make sure there's plenty of good wine for the wedding celebration. There's also a great depiction of the incident in which Jesus saves a woman from being stoned to death for adultery. 

Although it dates back to 1916, in some ways Intolerance is more modern than I expected. A long movie with big crowd scenes anticipates many epics that came after. The plot about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre depicting one religious faction killing people in another faction is unfortunately currently relevant. (While the plot depicts Catholics killing Protestants, Griffith shows that previously Protestants had carried out an attack on Catholics, and shows how one massacre becomes an excuse for another.) The jumps from one plotline to another are reminiscent of a recent film, Everything Everywhere All at Once, which to  tell you the truth I didn't like all that much. 

And there were other surprises. I did not expect the intensity of the violence. Some of the depictions of women in  Babylon were sexier than I expected. I was also surprised by some of the crowd scenes. The huge sets in the Babylon scenes are really impressive. I did not expect such as "wow" factor from such an old movie. 

Lots of critics of course have written about the movie. I couldn't find what Jesse Walker thought of it at his movie review site. The Wikipedia article says Pauline Kael considered it the greatest movie ever made. 

Here is the entire review from Scott Sumner, one of my favorite bloggers: "Intolerance (US, 1916) 3.5 This rating doesn’t mean much as it’s both a great film and a deeply flawed film. Today, 1916 seems like ancient history, and thus this historical epic has an additional layer of meaning for 2019 viewers, as compared to what people saw in 1916. On the other hand, the images are less astonishing than they would have appeared to 1916 audiences. That trade-off is sort of a microcosm of life. Has any other major director ever produced a very liberal film immediately after producing a very conservative film?"

Some of Robert Anton Wilson's themes come up in the movie. It shows why Prohibition is wrong and doesn't work, and it depicts how the system is cruel to the poor. 

In June, I'll pick another movie from RAW's top one hundred and watch it and blog about it. As with Intolerance, I'll announce my choice for anyone else who wants to take the opportunity to watch it, too. 

RAW movie club

I have been finally getting around to slowly pursuing a neglected interest of mine. I recently watched  an old John Wayne "B" movie called "The Lucky Texan" (not brilliant cinema, but interesting to see a young John Wayne) and "Sherlock Jr." starring Buster Keaton (actually a good film, with good stunts).

I figure I may as well combine that interest with this blog, so I've decided once a month to watch a movie from Robert Anton Wilson's list of his favorite 100 movies.  The obvious first choice would be Intolerance the long silent film which apparently influenced Illuminatus! So I will watch it in the next few days and blog about it next week. As it was issued in 1916, it has long been in the public domain, so it should be easy for anyone who wants to watch it with me and post comments to find a free copy. (For example, the Wikipedia article linked to in this paragraph has a copy). Nearly three hours long, so I may need to watch it as a serial.