Hot Tips for Wi-Fi TV

Okay, here’s a couple of tips for your wi-fi TV viewing pleasure. All up on the YouTube, with good resolution and in their entirety.

1. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.  This is a W.C. Fields vehicle, in fact I think that it was his last. Very nice hi-resolution viewing. The film features a lot of film-in-film styling; in fact most of it is a visualization of a cold script reading in a Hollywood studio. Tons of great lines.

“You’re as funny as a cry for help.”

“I was in love with a beautiful blonde once. She drove me to drink. That’s the one thing that I am indebted to her for.”

“How could a rock dropping from a thousand feet hurt your head?”

2. Scorpio Rising. (Kenneth Anger)  Oh . . . my . . . God. I missed this one when it was new. I was around that scene, but not of that scene. It’s what we used to call an “underground movie" (made in 1964). I really can’t say what I would have made of this movie back then. I saw quite a few of the undergrounds, but honestly I preferred things like French New Wave; Ingmar Bergman; Japanese cinema in general; and screwball comedies from the 1930s.

I watched Scorpio Rising for the first time just the other night. It looked as though Quentin Tarentino made a combination TV commercial for Harley Davidson Motorcycles and Tom’s of Finland, with gratuitous references to Nazism and Devil worship, featuring a lot of that old time Rock and Roll.

Disclaimer: you will be shocked.

3. Things to Come. 1936. This is such a famous movie that you should already have pictures in your head. It’s never been easy to find, but now it’s way up on the YouTube. Looks good too, very clear.

Super-futuristic; H.G. Wells story; staring Raymond Massey and Ralph Richardson. Great story and special effects. The social commentary hits like an overhand right from Mike Tyson. It was released only a couple of months before World War II started, and the action begins just as “World War II” was starting.

Thank God almighty that the real war did not go on as long as the war in this movie. So at the time it was a cautionary tale about war, but by now it’s a cautionary tale about how things could always have been worse.

Go ahead, check these out. Man, I love wi-fi TV.