Eight More from Crowther

 

Yojimbo

• Seen here was an expanded upon taste for Westerns' clichés.
• No deep drama was in the hard to follow plot complications.

 

The Wild One

• A part of the then contemporary American life was an ugly and debased menace. Those making up the menace, like a wolf pack, were seen from a frightening viewpoint.
• What with their aggressive contempt for police and common decency, the members of the pack enjoyed an advantage against those in a fair society that were not members of the pack.

 

Blackboard Jungle

• This was a tale of vicious and terrible hoods as animal-like juvenile delinquents. Could such horrors be real? The movie depicted terrorism by urban youth.
• The movie was social dynamite. It went beyond entertainment and perhaps stimulated youth.
• As an ineffective counterbalance, there was shown, briefly, an incredibly different school complete with palm trees.

 

Hud

• Ours was a culture, asserted Crowther, that nurtured indulgence and greed. We were foully diseased moderns.
• Some critics disapproved of the film's conventional morality. Hud was said to be no worse than all the rest of them.
• Moral scruples including respect for the law were addressed by the film. Such a subject could very well be more important than petroleum or the nuclear bomb.

 

Blowup

• Within the long wandering about into redundancy, there was good, solid substance in the film. It was a fascinating film having something to say about personal involvement and emotional commitment.
• The too candid dehumanizing potential of photography may have explained the film's blackballed status.

 

The Godfather

• Crowther found immense and astonishing scope in this film. As a moral society we were shown to be phoney.
• The ethics within the mob were put to us as supporting love, loyalty, and sentiment as opposed to the mores of the conventional capitalist economy. The mob's ethics were grounded in expediency and the audience went along with it.
• The film achieved the ultimate in fantasizing and romanticizing the genres of gangster and crime movies.

 

Nashville

• A great swath of the American scene was accurately developed in this film. The theme was that politics was everywhere in American life.
• The ubiquitous political cast to our lives was a grim and sinister take on the cheap and vicious Big Con of having the concept of values supported but specific values becoming vulgar.

 

Last Tango in Paris

• Because Brando was in this film; it got a lot of attention.
• Sheer lust was denigrated. A cruel sadistic way to loss of confidence and competence brought out brutality to a woman as part of a self-destructive urge.
• As a preventive for love, the male character became a sodomist. He was a strong symbol of evil, actually, there was nothing stronger.
• In sum it was the flame-out of the Heroic Age of movie entertainment. Perhaps it represented the American rape of the postwar world.

Five by Crowther

 

The Golden Coach

• You saw a teeming, colorful picture that was a beautiful sight.
• It was curiously hollow and meaningless.
• Anna Magnani was a lusty and lumpy termagant with raucous vitality wasted on a shrieking laugh at lame gags.

Shoeshine

• The film was a neorealist deeply devastating look at two boyish swindlers who are usually among those corrupted and corroded by circumstances.
• De Sica and others had cried out in pain against the terrible outrage committed by the powerful impersonal forces set against the post WWII Roman poor.

Breathless

• It was devoid of moral tone. It had a sordid view of the savage ways and moods of the rootless young of Europe.
• A cruel punk going nowhere in a couple of murky days did so in a vicious manner with ragged relations in regard to the world.
• The girl was imperious to morality or sentiment. She was cold, shrewd, and a self-defensive animal in a glittering, glib, irrational, and heartless world.
• The film's venom was in full force then and, later, youth could very well find themselves in a more poisonous milieu.

West Side Story

• This was nothing short of a cinema masterpiece, a rich artistic whole. The dances had sweep and vitality. There was a pulsing persistence of rhythm. The drama was valid and had integrity.
• The candy-store owner screams - You kids make this world lousy! When will you stop? It was a cry to be heard by all sympathetic and thoughtful Americans.
• It presented what was a staggering waste of the energy of youth.

Jules and Jim

• Arch and arty it was.
• It was about the perversities of enigmatic and evasive woman in a continual and babbling flow.
• Emotional content of the film was lodged in the score. You heard, too, long conversations and intrusive commentary.

Eight More from Kael

 

Yojimbo

• The soggiest humanitarian sentiments need not have had confirmation in the movies- said Kael.
• The kinesthetical response to the action was overwhelming. The action was so thoroughly and outrageously bloody that it got to a hilarious kind of style. It was a glorious comedy. The comic and exhilarating extreme violence didn't sicken you.
• Movies needed to have their concepts of heroism overturned.

 

The Wild One

• A news story became a nightmare on the screen. Then the misunderstood boy meets girl.
• The postwar lust for security got countered by Brando. He had his instincts. Society was crap and he knew it. He was strong enough not to take the crap.

 

Blackboard Jungle

• The youth center's activities did not negate the violence of delinquency. The delinquents weren't mistaken about being suspicious of psychiatric tinged social workers and teachers.
• The violence of delinquents had garnered headlines and Blackboard Jungle's creators wanted a traumatic structure gotten from a social problem drama. Police were called into theaters to quell the reactions to the violence of Blackboard Jungle. It was a violence that meant more than relief from a boring plot.
• The why for the violence was not sought. The boys had their codes, leaders, and gangs. They rejected society. Some persons reacted by putting it down to mixed-up kids. They still wanted the boys with them, within society.
• "...as yet, we have no social or political formulations that use indifference toward prosperity and success as a starting point for new commitments."

 

Hud

• In an America confused about enjoying prosperity, Hud was to be an indictment of materialism. It wasn't to lean on hokum, glamor, romance, tempo, and invoke a feeling for a place by means of the rhythm in and of a slick style.
• The misunderstood son pursues wives and attempts what could have been a ritual rape of the "white Negro" housekeeper. She invited "rape" and could have been grateful for his breaking down her resistance.
• The gunmen (the Nazis) shot the cows (the Jews). Kael's socialist friends couldn't accept cops if there was a necessary shoot but their government was to integrate schools and stop discrimination in housing while splintering the CIA that killed JFK.
• Her father had been adulterous and a Republican. He was also generous, kind, and a Western democrat not understood by Easterners.

 

Blowup

• Kael saw Marcel Marceau appreciated by an audience that applauded itself for its own appreciation of art. She preferred the Ritz Brothers. So Marceau was to the Ritz Brothers as Blowup was to movies that she liked.
• Blowup's peculiar slugged conscious was desired and became a personal matter to too many people. So what if it is sex without connection - naughty but nice? Easy sex doesn't mean an empty life.
• Movies of the past could make drama exciting and possible even if the protagonists were shallow and venal. Those movies did it without heavy symbolism standing in for self-importance.
• The photographer was an anti-hero. Thirty-eight people did not call the police in the Kitty Genovese case. Anti-humanism was so defined? Blowup had a complaint to register about dehumanization but it was carried out in a dehumanized way.

 

The Godfather

• The worst in America was its feudal ruthlessness.
• Organized crime was an obscene symbolic part of unleashed free enterprise and unbridled government economic policy.

 

Nashville

• She never loved a movie more. It was the ultimate Altman.
• Wild metaphors were filmed. The lonely degraded failures of an entire group of the poor turned into groupies.
• The movie was the funniest epic about America. It was exhilarating to feel a part of the life Altman showed you.

 

Last Tango in Paris

• The male of the movie had masculine pride and aggression and obscene debasement as reality. The female of the movie carried the whole history of movie passion in her long legs and a baby face of the bourgeois.
• Feelings about the sex scenes were unresolved. Nevertheless, the film was utterly beautiful to look at.
• It was the breakthrough. Finally emotional violence had been committed in the most erotic movie ever made. It could also become the most liberating movie ever made.

Five by Kael

 

The Golden Coach

• Jean Renoir in this ironic comedy found beauty in our being human. Such a status brings to us, via Renoir, illusion vs. reality and theater vs. life and confusion in role-playing of our identity.
• Anna Magnani gave her greatest screen performance.
• The film ended in loneliness and before the end, the viewer needed to have experienced the "feel" of the film. This entails feeling with A. Magnani the deep sense of the ridiculous, her deep roots that she can pull out, shake them in the face of pretension and convention, go back down, and be stronger. She laughs cosmically and cries "Mama Mia!"

Shoeshine

• Kael saw it alone in 1947. It was seen after a terrible lover's quarrel. She was crying and in incomprehensible despair.
• After the showing, a college girl said it wasn't special. How could this be? How could one not feel what the movie offered? Some needed a fist to hit them to provide the feeling.
• The movie came out of a welter of experience. It provided the truth about confusion and accident in our affairs.
• The boys had their dreams betrayed. Their weaknesses and desires were exploited.

Breathless

• She proclaimed this film to be the most important New Wave film to arrive in the U.S. It was a frightening chase comedy.
• What appears to happen was accidental. The two principals of the film were a horrible possible new race of chaos-embracing, casual, and carefree moral idiots. They were of a terrifying mass society that has its members indifferent to human values.
• The girl was an impervious, passively butch American. Not giving a damn, she was a sad, sweet, and affectless doll. Existence for her was to experiment with roles. She was in the most terrifyingly style a muse and a bitch and a goddess.

West Side Story

• Kael thought the movie was an attempt to be more than a musical. It blasted stereophonic music and otherwise was attempting to stun you.
• The movie was a frenzied hokum pretending to deal with racial tensions.
• The dancing lost the feel of the best of American dance. It did not have the rhythm of unpretentious movement.
• The ultimate wisdom the movie imparted was "You kids make this world lousy! When will you stop?"

Jules and Jim

• It is, said Kael, one of the most beautiful films ever made. Truffant was showing his love of life as completely as he could.
• The Legion of Decency stated the film was "in a context alien to Christian and traditional natural morality." "If the director has a definite moral viewpoint to express, it is so obscure that the visual amorality and immorality of the film are predominant..."
• Kael found it to be "exquisitely and impeccably moral - as a work of art, though she found Catherine to be morally insane.
• Catherine was super-white à la "Negroes now" being so sensitive about their rights that equality was not on the table.

Four Hour Shifts for Telecommute Editor

 

an ad:

“Work from home providing corrections and suggestions for academic and business papers. Work in four-hour shifts according to your schedule. This is a contract opportunity that requires skill in style manuals like Chicago, APA, MLA, CSE and AP. Two years of professional editing experience and a graduate degree are required. Location: remote Compensation: $300-$3000”

I considered this employment opportunity since I am set up for writing and editing at home and have been doing it for years. A new to me wrinkle was that you work in four hour shifts. The style manuals listed are well enough known. They don't mention Turabian. A graduate degree is needed? But then you could make 3000... or 300.

So I went to their website and looked at the detail about the position. Actually, you work according to their schedule in 4 hour stretches at certain times they specify and on certain days they specify. In addition your rate of compensation depends on what day and shift you work. No breakdown of specifics per day and shift is stated. Also, how much you are compensated depends on how many other editors are on your shift. This number, this competition, is unknown to you.

Nevertheless, I filled out the online application that asks for name, phone, address, and more particulars. Thereafter you are to take tests to gauge your suitability. I didn't make it past the first test. I would have preferred the test before the application.

The test was on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and markup per a style sheet. Doing the test I encountered questions about the Turabian. The questions often were 4 sentences that at first glance looked very much alike. How they were different was the key. Something about one of them was correct. Sometimes I couldn't find how they differed. I assumed it was something to do with spacing. Sometimes there were 2 sentences to compare. If it were to be 2 or 4, so what, that's not real work. A customer wouldn't offer you a choice. In reality you look at one "example" and don't have to play needle in the haystack. One particularly irritating series of questions, four in number, was about a matchup of letters standing in for the style sheets vs. matchup with placement of parts of a document.

Something like that. Anyway, I missed those 4 and that in itself would have been enough for failure. It turns out that of the 42 questions, you could miss two. I assume one or none was preferable. And, no, I did not miss 3, I got the old time gentleman's B-. If they would have told me at the outset that miss three and you’re out, then one quickly comes to the realization that this isn't the only game in town.

Good luck to all of you who attempt the test. May the score be with you.

Sample Corrected Federal Resume

 

Rocket Scientist Rocket Engineer - GS 04566

Doc Smith

4987 Missile Launch Way

Cape Kennedy, FL 09876

Home Phone: 913-044-0001

Email: docs@nasa.net

US Citizen

Veteran's Preference: Y

Highest Previous Grade: Test Dummy Not Applicable

PROFILE

Industrious and outgoing with proven organizational, administrative, and management accomplishments. Demonstrated research and problem solving skills. Detail oriented with skill in managing and tracking projects. All Almost all deadlines met. Project reports are in a superior category accurate in regard to justification to Mission Control. Outstanding ratings via the Russians. Presentations are to a high state of spit polish. Team work is essential and accordingly never falters.

EDUCATION

1998, Doctor of Rocketry Repair, Cal St, California State University, Sacramento, Calif, CA 00 200 semester hours, Major: Fuels and heat energy exchange, Minor: History, GPA of 5.0 4.2 of 5.0  Audited Trajectory Equations.

1988, Bachelor of Science, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, 80 semester hours, Major: Advanced Calculus, Minor: Topology of Accelerated Torsion, GPA of 4.99 .95 of 5.20

COLLEGE RESEARCH PROJECTS:

CHIMP TO THE MOON: Designed and tested experiments and conducted research in support of sending a chimp one way to the moon. I investigated and measured altitudes attitudes towards the fallout over the permanently departed chimp the potential success. Fuel additives and alternatives were checked at flashpoint levels. Bats, rats, and gnats were in the control group at 50,000 feet. The experimental group escaped the zoo was difficult to quantify.

APPLIED PSYCHOLOGICAL CALCULATIONS TOO QUICK TO BURN TEMPERAMENTAL FUELS, BOTH SOLID and LIQUID PROPELLANTS

Each test object sailed went skyward at least to moon level above the horizon,certainly more than four inches to obtain objectives. Methods and techniques used to research and analyze a more practical situation.

DEVELOPED AND ADMINISTERED QUESTIONNAIRES

Fuel technicians and animal trainers where most thoroughly queried as to how and why their endeavors intersected. None found.

COMMUNICATED AND COLLABORATED WITH MARTIANS DISGUISED AS CLASSMATES

Discussed aspects of being the mission control specialist for the return from Mars from Mars while remaining on Mars. Presented results and conclusions to professors who blew it off.

COMPUTER SYSTEMS STOLEN ON LOAN FROM RUSSIAN RUSSIANS H-BOMB WITH COBALT ADDITIVE (DOOMDAY MACHINE) TO PROVIDE TASK SUPPORT FOR SELF-DESTRUCTIVE PROPULSION FOR GAME SIMULATION DEVELOPMENT

WhomeverWhoever initiates the Mars return countdown is fated to remain there. Computer game simulation involvement at the last is critical.

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY

01/1999 to Present, Chief Fiduciary Compliance Person, Procedures Activist, Assitant Assistant to All As Needed for Public Affairs, Werner von Braun Mausoleum, Coral Gables, Florida, or Houston, Texas. Librarian for back issues of Die Rakete. Made model of Raketenflugplatz. Recorded soundtrack of October 3, 1942, launch of A4. Program notes for See Merritt Island As It Is Today! Hours vary. No financial compensation. Lots of vacation time. Dr. Augustus Huh Hught, 510-888-1230, Contact: maybe Yes

REVIEWED, ANALYZED, AND EVALUATED all of my plans, contributions and distributions. All compliance standards followed to a T as required.

DEMONSTRATED OUTSTANDING COMMUNICATION SKILLS, to all who entered the WVB the Mausoleum, and of those three lost individuals there was one former astronaut. Responded promptly and properly to all questions about the ongoing Martian suicide launch control plans.

AWARDS, HONORS, RECOGNITION

High honors at local beach Science Fictions fish fry.

Many talks given at ruined traffic lights on esoteric pitch and roll problems of the V2.

TRAINING

Physical endurance severly severely tested by pursuing bill clerks.

Proficient in all personal computer systems since Jobs in the garage. Can reconstruct any and all and apply to rocketry.