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I’ve seen some articles where the writer signs off from the Internet for a month or so, and it usually winds up that their lives are improved, as they interact more with the Real World, family friends, people in the street, and find that The Old Ways Were Best, and everyone should log off and take a walk. It’s like Walden for the New Millennium.

I just spent a month and a half without the Internet, and I am here to say this is bullshit.

no-internet-accessI used to have broadband through my local cable company; we parted ways somewhat acrimoniously years ago, and I went to DSL – after all, I was already paying for a phone line, this made sense. That worked out fine for a while, until the landline cut out. The DSL was still functioning, but our phones were dead. The technician who came out informed me it was our phone. I told him that seemed unlikely since I had tried three separate phones with the same result. I insisted he plug his own handset into the outlet, and got the same results I had with three increasingly expensive phones. Then he said he could rewire the connecting but wouldn’t, since he’d just have to do it all over again when I replaced the siding on my house. I could not get him to tell him how he knew I would suddenly get enough money to replace the siding in the near future.

His gift of prophecy was wrong, anyway. Yet I continued on. I attempted to go back to the cable company, but that ended in tears again, as I was getting no signal to their modem and yet they thought I should pay for this. Come to think of it, that was remarkably similar to my experience with the phone company.

LIES ALL LIES

LIES ALL LIES

The sad part is, maintaining the status quo was less work so I did that, rationalizing that I was at least getting stable service from my DSL. Then that service was sold to another company, and everything went to hell. Most of my revenue stream dried up, and I couldn’t afford the non-service I was getting anymore.

So. Back to the Cable Company. I got my self-installation kit. A nice young man came out and put some sort of filter on the existing cable outside. I hooked up the Wireless Gateway™ and watched nothing happen. Then I got stiffed on an appointment three days later (I do not yell at Customer Service Reps because I like to be different. I did, however, tell him what I thought of the technician blaming me for the missed appointment). Then, a week and two days after the Self-Installation Failure, a technician showed up and fixed the problem in about an hour. Therefore, I feel all better about the company.

Also, I never had to wait more than five minutes to talk to a CSR, which is nothing short of miraculous, in my estimation.

My son, however, has better hair than this.

My son, however, has better hair than this.

In this time, I only had access to the Internet at work and on my smartphone. My teenage son probably thought he was imprisoned in a Siberian gulag. My Facebook-addicted wife thought the same. I don’t want to talk about the data overage charges on the cell phones.

Let me bore you further, as to why the Internet is more of a necessary utility to me than a luxury that can be cut out in lean times: as I said, projects I had worked on in the past had reached their conclusion, which also included the paychecks I was earning. I’m glad the economy and the job situation is good for the country currently, but I have to say the market for 59 year-old men with my particular skill set hasn’t widened appreciably. I’m still looking, and every now and then something will come across my LinkedIn desktop that ever-so-slightly sounds like me. I apply and send along my resume.

Just as the Internet drought had begun, I got an e-mail telling me I had gotten the job, and would be embarking on a two-week trial period to see if I fit in; the e-mail listed the job duties again, and what the prospective salary would be. This was all good; finally, a chance to use all these skills and knowledge, and the work seemed pretty exciting, too. The money was good enough to get me out of my current financial hole. I wrote back thanking them, but saying due to the timing, I was about to work the Independence Day weekend at my current job, and would be out-of-pocket for those three days.

I received an e-mail back that my first duty would be to book airline and hotel reservations for a casting director coming to Houston the week after, and a cashier’s check was being cut for me to cover that cost and my own expenses.

Pretty sure this is what the SOB looked like.

Pretty sure this is what the SOB looked like.

My heart sank as I read that e-mail. That was the oldest scam in the books. I had not even done a phone interview at that point, much less talked to anyone face-to-face at a supposedly local company, and they were still sending me a large check via FedEx?

This, I guess, was the Long Dark Tea Time of My Soul. I had spent several days thinking that everything was going to be all right, that things were looking up, hey, maybe there is something to this prayer business, you know? That all went away as I stared at that letter on my phone’s screen. Nothing was going to get better. And someone was actively trying to make it even worse.

My wife was spending the night at a friend’s house, who was recovering from surgery, so I had no shoulder to cry on. I had a Very Bad Half-Hour. I did send her a series of texts about how this had turned out. They probably read like a suicide note.

After the Half-Hour I allowed myself for the pity party, I started getting angry. Not only because I had been promised a better tomorrow, but because they thought I was stupid enough to fall for such a transparent ruse. I took stock – what did they know about me? What had I told them? Name, address, phone number, e-mail address – all things that can be found out fairly easily. No social security numbers or bank info, which would have been the next thing they hoped I was stupid enough to supply (I was supposed to text them a photo of the deposit slip, which I would have painted out the numbers on even if this had been legit).

No, wait, this is probably what he looked like.

No, wait, this is probably what he looked like. Or at least dressed like.

I did as much research as I could on my phone, but it was like I was blind in one eye and on crutches; things I was attempting to do were rendered extremely cumbersome. That Saturday I was going over to Rick’s to watch movies, and I brought a laptop and mooched off his wi-fi. Tracked down who had actually registered the Gmail account that was corresponding with me. Who had registered that “Under Construction” web site for what was supposed to be a long-established company. I reported my situation to LinkedIn. Never heard a thing from them.

I survived the Independence Day weekend (again). Then the FedEx package arrived, and I called the FBI.

The FBI Lady made sure I hadn’t compromised myself, then gave me a list of things to do. There is an online form for reporting stuff like this, which I did at my earliest access to Internet. I called the bank whose name was on the cashier’s check, and the lady there verified that it was a forgery, and told me they had been dealing with this particular operation for three months. No, they didn’t need the check for their files, but thank you.

I filled out the FBI form, probably supplying way too much information (I actually hit the character limit in a couple of fields). If I hadn’t been suspicious before, the fact that the return address on the FedEx envelope was from a healthcare company should have tipped me off. I fired off an e-mail to their corporate office that their account had been hacked.

No! No! This is what he looked like!

No! No! This is what he looked like!

Not everybody is a suspicious bastard like me. Not everybody read with interest about online scams in the early parts of this Digital Age. Too many people have probably fallen for this, or something like it. Did my efforts make this any more difficult for them? Probably not, but it didn’t help them.

Facing that crap without access to online tools made me feel truly alone. So I put my animosity with the cable company aside and said, this time I will make it work. Well, my part of that is pretty small, it was mainly thanks to a tech named Paul that made it work. I’m just getting used to the idea that when I see a movie clip being ballyhooed online I no longer have to say, “Yeah, I’ll have to check that out tomorrow at work.”

My time without the ‘Net wasn’t all bad – I read many books (Hey, it turns out that John Scalzi guy is actually pretty good!), but I also played a lot of solitaire. I created a busywork project that I may now never finish… because it was busywork, but at least it didn’t require net access.

My enforced absence from the Information Highway proved to me one thing, and that is I rely heavily on it for research, Whether it’s the proper spelling of concomitant or what exactly was the deal with the Dick Tracy villain “Oodles”, I grew used to having that at my fingertips (yes, I own a dictionary. Yes, shut up). The crisis with the fake job and constantly having to figure out work-arounds for the websites I manage delineated my need for access in very stark detail.

happyThis Election season may yet cause me to forsake Facebook or edit it to hell and back, but that’s another issue entirely (I am told that living in an echo chamber would be a bad thing). Not being able to be flabbergasted by my fellow humans’ idiocy on it – that’s a problem. I use Facebook and Twitter for business purposes, not simply for excuses to be pissed off.

So yes, modern-day Thoreaus, more power to you and your neo-Luddite ways. Enjoy your non-digital lives. Of course, you’ll never know that I’m wishing you well, because I’m embracing my 64-bit existence.

Now if you’ll excuse me, a buttload of movie trailers just dropped. Holy guacamole, they now play without buffering or stuttering.

It’s like witchcraft.

July 27, 2016
Categories: Seething Impotent Rage . Tags: . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Medium Cool (1969)

medium cool posterSo I see a lot of people had the brilliant idea to watch Medium Cool this Summer. Something about the looming Republican Convention, I’m sure. There are also a lot of people saying 2016 is 1968 all over again. It isn’t, though there are parallels.

There is unrest. There is seemingly unending domestic violence. There is change in the air, some hope (myself included). All these are playing into that hot-take cauldron proclaiming a carbon copy of 1968. No wonder so many are investigating this intriguing snapshot of that time.

First of all, Haskell Wexler is a name to respect among cameramen and cinematographers. Go look at that IMDb entry, and find out why so many were sad when he passed away just after Christmas last year. Now consider that in 1968, he felt ready to direct a feature film, and that film was nearly The Concrete Wilderness, the story of a transplanted Appalachian boy raising pigeons in the slums of Chicago. The remnants of that story are still evident in Medium Cool, but what we really get is a story about Haskell Wexler.

mc1Robert Forster is John Cassellis, a cameraman for the news department of a local station. We meet him as he’s filming a dead woman at the site of a recent car wreck, along with his sound man, Gus (Peter Bonerz). As they pack up their gear, John says to Gus, “Better call an ambulance.” Despite that questionable intro, we soon find that John has something of a conscience, along with some misgivings about his trade. He tries to follow the story of a black cabbie turning in a lost bag containing ten thousand dollars, against the wishes of his news director. And the day he finds out – to his dismay – that his footage has been routinely turned over to the police and the FBI so they can scope out radical elements, he’s also fired.

watching-tvJohn has also, by sheer accident and misunderstanding, met Harold (Harold Blankenship), the aforementioned boy, and his mother Eileen (Verna Bloom). A romance begins to blossom – there’s something in Eileen that John doesn’t see in his current flame, the nurse Ruth (Marianna Hill). Eventually, John gets another gig jobbing in as a cameraman during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention; he doesn’t realize that Harold, seeing his mother getting intimate with John, has run away and is basically bumming around Grant Park until it’s safe to go home. Eileen, still wearing her yellow party dress from the night before, is similarly roaming the streets trying to find him – as the protests around the Convention begin to move toward the riots that would dominate the media that Summer.

Medium-Cool-Chicago-RiotThis is probably the most famous aspect of Medium Cool, that Wexler and his cameramen (only one or two, past Wexler himself), are actually in the streets filming, and Verna Bloom is right there, wandering around in character, occasionally in harm’s way, as cops in riot gear and National Guardsmen in barbed-wire festooned jeeps get into position. There’s also footage of Forster in the Convention, as in the background we hear things starting to go to shit on the floor. This is a remarkable piece of filmmaking, with everybody on their game. It gets especially tense as you realize that is most definitely Verna Bloom in there, evidencing brass balls the size of Gibraltar, getting those shots. Wexler apparently tried to get her to go home as the situation intensified, and she refused.

One of the most referenced shots involves Wexler, as a National Guardsman – tired of being on camera, perhaps – lobs a tear gas grenade at his feet. As the gas drifts up, you see the camera shakily moving back, and you hear someone say, “Watch out Haskell – it’s real!” Wexler says the line was added in post production, but that it was pretty much what was going through his mind as the first sting of the gas hit him (The shot is in the Criterion Three Reasons clip, below).

Medium Cool1On the other hand, in a shot that was meant to provoke a reaction, Bloom cuts through a line of Guardsman and addresses their commander – in character, telling him she’s looking for her son. The commander waves her through, and even points the way toward someone who might be able to help her.

I referred to the movie as “a snapshot”, because the Convention footage doesn’t have the only message Wexler wants to convey; after the car wreck opening we have a sequence at a party where people are hotly discussing the role of news media, and the increasing danger and resentment they face. Later, in a post-coital talk, Ruth asks a question about Mondo Cane that I also asked when I first saw it at 10 years of age (which sort of explains a lot about me, I guess). John’s attempt to follow up on the cabbie story leads to a discussion of the black experience, circa 1968. John and Gus go on other stories before John’s fall, including the riot training of the same National Guardsmen we’ll see in Chicago, and Resurrection Town near the Lincoln Reflecting Pool, soon after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Resurrection TownThere’s more, more more. A slow pan around a hotel kitchen as we hear Robert Kennedy’s last speech, and if you lived through that time, you know exactly what is coming, and you feel your pulse rate quicken. Mass media critiquing over a TV special containing footage of King’s greatest speeches, about media being complicit in a week-long catharsis so regular business can resume. There is more that was excised, some of which is excerpted in a documentary about the making of Medium Cool called (appropriately) Look Out Haskell, It’s Real involving the politicization of Eileen with a real-life speech by the Rev. Jessie Jackson (Jackson still crops up in the Resurrection Town footage).

GasJonathan Haze was a line producer (yes, that Jonathan Haze, Little Shop of Horrors and a bunch of others), and had connections with the local activists, so Haskell knew where to set up the next day for protest footage. (If you look quick, you can catch footage of Wexler and Haze being treated for tear gas exposure during the riot footage) Even then, there’s a counter-balancing sequence in which John takes Eileen to a go-go, where even in her yellow dress she is quite the fish out of water. There’s a band playing what the subtitles assure us is “Psychedelic rock”, though what is actually playing – out of sync, which makes the strobing and quick-cutting even more discombobluating – is The Mothers of Inventions’ “Go to San Francisco”, which has Zappa singing “Every town must have a place where phony hippies meet/Psychedelic dungeons popping up on every street”.

In a few minutes, though, we’ll be separating the phonies from the real revolutionaries. The real ones will the ones that are bleeding. And they are a diverse lot, not the cartoon hippies Zappa is satirizing.

Medium Cool is a startling blend of the real and unreal, until the viewer reaches a point where one is not quite sure which is which – until the third act, when the reality becomes undeniable – and then that controversial final scene, echoing the beginning, where we are challenged once more to define for ourselves what is real and what is not. And that is a thread that runs through the movie, even though Wexler claimed he had never read Marshall McLuhan – the necessity of the viewer, while taking in the imagery of a “cool medium” like TV, to rise above the simple, non-interactive nature of that medium, to inquire, to judge, to determine what about it is real, if anything.

It may not be 1968 all over, but that central message is more important than ever.

 Buy Medium Cool on Amazon

 

 

 

 

July 18, 2016
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: , , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974)

the-swinging-cheerleaders-movie-poster-1974-1020206557There is sort of sad nostalgia about my relationship with the drive-in theaters of the 70s, especially when it was married to my recent acquisition of a driver’s license. This was the beginning of personal freedom, my friends and I piling into the family station wagon and heading out to the Skyway Twin on the weeknight where an entire carload could get in for one low price. This is where I saw Texas Chainsaw and Torso on a double bill, but it was also where we were sure to see those other magical R-rated movies with titles like Student Teachers and Night Call Nurses. I should say especially sure, because these were important to my budding, frustrated and often confused sexuality.

I was reasonably confident I had seen The Swinging Cheerleaders at some point during this, when my life was full of possibilities and my own innate superiority.

Did you know these sonsabitches were still being made? I did not!

Did you know these sonsabitches were still being made? I did not!

When I found out that Arrow Video was prepping a 2K restoration and blu-ray, I knew I would have to try and re-capture that brief window of time – although this time I would be doing it without hollow sound blaring from a metal speaker hanging on the driver’s side window, without the humidity of a hot Texas night, and without the smell of a burning coil of Pic® Mosquito Repellent. All of these are highly overrated.

It turned out I actually hadn’t seen The Swinging Cheerleaders. I probably would have remembered it better if I had, because director Jack Hill delivers an actual movie.

the-swinging-cheerleaders

Mesa University is having a great football year, thanks to star quarterback Buck (Ron Hajak). The cheerleader squad, though, is down one girl, and who should show up to try-outs but Kate (Jo Johnston), who wants into the squad to research her term paper on “Female exploitation in contemporary society”, which her boyfriend The Campus Radical Ron (Ian Sander) also wants to run in his underground newspaper. Kate is going to find out that Buck is, under his swaggering front, actually a nice guy, and Ron, under his progressive front, is a sniveling weasel. That’s not much to hang a movie on, so the Coach (Jack Denton), Dean Putnam (George Wallace) and math instructor Professor Thorpe (Jason Sommers) are rigging the games to make a fortune in gambling, which makes a much better exposé for Kate, since she’s also found out even cheerleaders can be worthwhile people.

swinging1Well, except for Mary Ann (Colleen Camp), the leader of the squad who hates Kate, because Buck is her boyfriend. Oh, and also she’s the daughter of Dean Putnam. And we haven’t yet mentioned Lisa (Roseanne Katon), our token black cheerleader, who is dating the very-married Prof. Thorpe. And then there’s Andrea (Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith), who is dating running back Ross (Ric Carrott), but can’t bring herself to lose her virginity to him. She’s advised by Kate and Lisa to do it with a stranger, and she winds up settling on Ron, who invites some friends over for a gang bang, which leads to Ross beating the crap out of him, and Ron’s subsequent reprisal against cheerleaders in general and Kate in specific.

The Other Cheapest Special Effect: 70s wallpaper.

The Other Cheapest Special Effect: 70s wallpaper.

Now, you are thinking, this is an exceptional amount of plot for a T&A drive-in flick and you are absolutely correct. In the third act, the trio of faculty gamblers decide Mesa have to lose the big game to State to really clean up, and the uncooperative Buck has to be kidnapped – at this point all those subplots go away in favor of low-budget slapstick action. There is a certain amount of grousing online about this movie, and that is at its core: there’s some nudity from our three main cheerleaders (sorry, Colleen Camp fans, villains don’t get nude scenes), and a whole lot of interpersonal relationships. Like I said, Hill delivered an actual movie, not an excuse for my teenaged self to ogle nekkid women. My middle-aged self is reasonably okay with this.

That cravat deserves its own credit.

That cravat deserves its own credit.

What I tend to be more interested in this Internet age (where it is ridiculously easy to see nekkid women) is the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, and watching The Swinging Cheerleaders allows you see a man who was a master at artful efficiency at work. Arrow Video has Jack Hill on the commentary track, and it is a beautiful thing to hear him talk about directing. He points out which scenes were achieved by simply dressing up a corner of the soundstage (it’s quite a few, including one where they didn’t even bother to throw up some flats), why pacing is so important to a movie, his history with the crew and actors. The Swinging Cheerleaders was shot in twelve days, which is extraordinary – even AIP generally went to eighteen. The sharpness of the new transfer allows you to note that the teams’ practice uniforms are turned inside-out to obscure a real team’s logo, and follow background props as they magically move from location to location. That was a really popular brand of hot plate in 1974, it seems.

Where'd you go, Jo?

Where’d you go, Jo?

Our heroes and heroines are all young and personable – it’s surprising to note that this is Jo Johnston’s sole credit. Colleen Camp is still acting (last seen in Aquarius), Roseanne Katon went on to become a Playmate of the Month and was acting up through the 80s. Rainbeaux Smith, so winning and vulnerable as Andrea, we lost to heroin and hepatitis. The bad guys – all adults, and outsiders to the intended audience, are cartoonish at best, but in the Nixon years, that is what we urgently desired: bad guys that could easily be defeated by good clean Americans.

Arrow Video Cover

I mean, look at that. That is GORGEOUS.

There’s also a new interview with Jack Hill in the extras, 83 years old and sharp as a tack. I sincerely hope he’s writing his memoirs. The Swinging Cheerleaders was made after his back-to-back successes with Coffy and Foxy Brown; this was his shot at avoiding being typecast as The Blaxploitation Director. He hasn’t made a movie since 1983’s Sorceress – from which he removed his name. And that is a shame. Hill could have made it as a director of “A” movies easily, though I suspect he didn’t want to give up the creative freedom small-budgeted fare allowed him. The Swinging Cheerleaders isn’t his best movie, but it’s a solid one. The blu-ray is deserved, if only to hear a legend talk about his craft.

The most amazing thing for me about that Arrow Disc (past the Hill commentary)? As ever, the cover art is reversible, so you can have the movie poster on front, which is my usual preference. This time, though, that cover art by Graham Humphreys is so good, I’m leaving it as is.

Buy The Swinging Cheerleaders on Amazon

July 6, 2016
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments