Face Analysis Face-Off, Part the Second...

Chilean werewolves... Argentinian space aliens... and a Swedish Dracula.

In our last episode, I (in partnership with my pals Aaron and Amber) discovered how to meticulously drain the validity out of an online personality test by bombarding it for days with images of various movie monster faces. The results were mostly hilarious, but they really got me to thinking about exactly how this particular Nametests.com game – titled "Which Nationality Do You Resemble Most?" – was designed in order to determine its various outcomes.

Did the test, as hinted at in both its cover and results images, use three pinpointed target areas on a candidate's Facebook profile picture to capture the necessary information? Or was the whole thing really just a hit or miss affair, especially when none of the results made a lick of sense, except in what I would offer up as circumstances of pure coincidence. An example of this would be when Aaron's picture of Godzilla came out as Japanese, which made sense factually. But then my picture of the aliens from Invasion of the Saucer Men also came out as Japanese. The only similarity between the two photos? Both pictures seemed to have slanted eyes. So was the test also extremely racist as well?

[To read Face Analysis Face-Off, Part the First, go to https://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2017/05/face-analysis-face-off-part-first.html.]

Often in the full ten days or so that I goofed around with this silly test, I noticed one factor that kept getting repeated. Even though I was swapping out profile photos every single day (and sometimes even faster) while also deleting the previous photo so that it couldn't be picked up by the test again, after the fifth picture was posted and deleted, that picture kept returning from the dead. The fifth picture was of Lon Chaney, Jr. from Universal's The Wolf Man (1941). I kept swapping photos but that stubborn Wolf Man would get picked up by my next iteration of the same test even when I had moved on to other creatures, like Dracula and the Saucer Men. The Wolf Man, who was named as Italian in his original test, began to get new nationalities each time, like Chilean and Russian.

On the fourth time that the Wolf Man reappeared as the selection inside the nationality test (though still Russian that time), I began to wonder, "What if I skipped Facebook at first and went directly to the Nametests website and tried to take this test there?" And so I did a search for "face analysis nametests" to find a direct link. To a small bit of astonishment on my part (but just small), up came a list on Google of numerous tests on the Nametests site which were mostly built around facial photo analysis. The nationality test was sitting in the middle of those results, and I was moved to go in a different direction. "Hey! Let's see if I get either the Wolf Man or the Saucer Men if I click into one of those other links!"

Seriously, that was all I was thinking going forward, and I was really considering how much more of my time this little spur of the moment research was going to cost me. So, having cast aside all good judgment on my part, I clicked on the second test titled "Let's Analyze Your Face!" (which, on a different website might have a whole other meaning and pronunciation, disgusting or otherwise, depending on your particular needs).

And the result?

Sadly, it doesn't say "Wolf Man's Face Analysis" instead of my name, and I am going to dock them extra points for leaving "analysis" without a capital in the title and for dropping the apostrophe for the possessive at the beginning too. (Then again, a quick glance at the entire graphic shows that they are all over the place with capitalization.)

As to the five details in their results of "my" face analysis, it goes without saying that the Wolf Man (since it is actually his face being analyzed) often does think only of love, given his penchant for carrying off the occasional female. (You can make doggy style jokes on your own.) This might tie into his "passionate" eyes as well; even if his passion is not necessarily about love, he is certainly wound up about nearly everything in his movies. Next, it says his nose is "pretty small," but are they just counting his snout-like tip or the entire bridge as well? Taken as a whole, his nose doesn't really seem all that tiny, unless they were basing it on the itty-bitty version of his profile pic they dropped into their graphic. Fourth, if you count his ability to howl crazily like nobody's business, then you could say the Wolf Man "yells very loudly". Finally, he is the Wolf Man. He has stamina and power like few other monsters, and since he is chased by villagers quite often, he does need to be ahead of everyone else.

While I was at first disappointed that the Wolf Man was still coming up as my profile pic after having been deleted nearly a week earlier, I could not argue with the results that I got from this other random testing. The success of this test then made me wonder just how many different face analysis tests the Nametests site had on hand. And so I started to take all of the tests that had shown up on my Google search page.

Up third was a test called "What does your face analysis reveal about you?" If I worried about what would happen if my latest profile pic of the Saucer Men showed up instead on one of these tests, simply by accident but thereby negating this latest fun chain, I needn't have. When the swirly dial stopped spinning after I connected the test to Facebook, ol' Wolfie was back yet again, and here is what I saw...

Once more basing my reading of the results against the monster's known personality traits and not mine (though I am -- ahem -- all of the quite noble things listed above), we are told that Wolfie is "honest and sincere". I suppose that one could mostly say that at first about the Lawrence Talbot character before the first film's transformative bite by Bela Lugosi's gypsy character (who, by the way, looks like a normal wolf and not like a man with wolf makeup on his face and hands), but after that bite, Talbot is really not to be trusted ever again. Even in his final appearance in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, where he is pretty heroic both as man and monster from the start, he still lies to the boys (or, rather, hides the fact) about his actual identity at first (though mainly to protect himself while he attempts to save everyone from Count Dracula).

To the second point of his being "a brother and a friend," Talbot certainly serves in the Abbott and Costello film as a friend, and he returns to his ancestral home in both the original 1941 film and the 2010 version due to the death of his brother (though in the second film, he arrives home just as his missing brother's body has been discovered). As far as sensitivity goes, certainly the Talbot character is overly prone to letting his mood – whether sad or angry – affect his behavior, and while he may not have a will strong enough to prevent his transformations, he is certainly adept at fighting in any situation. The fourth point, that he is "a born guardian," is the outlier here. You could use his appearance in the Abbott and Costello film to make the case, since he is mostly attempting to protect other people from Dracula and the Frankenstein monster that the vampire wishes to revive. But his actions in the other films are all over the place, and often in increasingly evil ways, and so he really doesn't have the sort of reputation where you could say he is a consistent guardian of anything except for himself.

The fourth test on the search list was titled "Have Your Face Analyzed! Click Here!" You might think that I am being a little too OCD when pulling the title off the list, but really, when you see the graphic, it still says "Click Here!" at the top of it, even though there is no longer anything on which to click. (This proves once more how fly-by-night these operations really are.) This one drew an immediate loud fit of laughter from me when I saw the results...

Boy, these guys sure can sweet talk a wolfman! My (his) eyes are deep and my (his) smile is beautiful. Somehow, via the application of a heavy Jack Pierce makeup design which clearly show numerous lines and pockmarks, my "age by appearance" has been mysteriously halved to a youthful 26. The overall impression line at the end says that "Rik is meant for great things," which announces boldly to me that these guys really haven't got the memo about me, have they?

The next test is one called "What does your face analysis reveal?"...

Hey, everybody! I've got a pretty face! Well, pretty is as pretty does, and this is pretty damn ridiculous. It says in the text section below the graphic box that "one glance is enough to take your wonderful personality in and that's why everyone loves to be your friend". I'm sorry... isn't that called "judging a book by its cover"? And isn't that something you are usually taught not to do?

It does strike me that absolutely anyone could take these tests and not be told they look like a bucket of shit. I guess they don't want to incur a possible lawsuit if people took a face analysis test on their website and were so depressed that they killed themselves over the result. I guess they've never considered those of us who still might do the same because we are ultra-sensitive and sick to death about being lied to like this.

Of course, these tests are meant and built to be nothing but positive in their results. It's a feel good test to take on a shitty day where you need a lovely pick-me-up. Even a white supremacist asshole like Richard Spencer could come home after a hard day of inciting violence against other races and spewing his Nazi-like hatred, and maybe he has had a rough time because he got punched in the face again for just being a dick, and he feels he needs a release from the day's pressure. So, he jumps on Facebook – because he knows he will spend the next few hours on Grindr edging along to femboys with Nazi-inspired haircuts, so he wants to get the light stuff out of the way first – and he runs across the test titled "What does your face analysis reveal?"

Just for the sake of argument, let's put aside the notion that Spencer probably has a flag or symbol representing whatever his stupid ass, neolithic organization is as his profile pic, and just assume that he put up a 320 pixel squared image of his own mug. (Because, while I am hardcore about doing research, I am not about to look up Richard Spencer on Facebook.) Now, any personality test worth its salt in credibility would take a look at his face and go, "Obviously, you are a racist shit-heel with reprehensible, outmoded, and severely dangerous thoughts, and you have a perfectly vile personality to match." Arguably, the line could go on with "But your eyes are so, so pretty"; just as long as it got the racist call-out in place first. Nope, even Richard Spencer gets to have his load lightened by having it tell him exactly what came up above for the Wolf Man. And while the Wolf Man may have been a vicious, out of control killer, he was no racist. He would have bitten anybody... anybody! That is, if Universal Studios in the 1940s would have given any of those parts to anybody that wasn't white.

The sixth test reverted back to a previous title – "Let's Analyze Your Face!" – but with a far different angle to it...

Man, my eyes (or rather, the Wolf Man's eyes) do a whole lot of things. They have been variously pretty, deep, and passionate; here, they are not just "108% flirty" (like that's possible), but they also "radiate power and virtue"! Hold on there! I have a hard enough time just maintaining the flirtiness... how the hell am I supposed to radiate at the same time? That's some Cyclops-level shit there. (Though he did win Jean Grey over even though his ruby quartz sunglasses are definitely not of the flirty variety... or his optic battle visor for that matter. I guess, hanging around mutants her whole life, Jean just got into some weird dudes.) My smile is also "105% funny," which is a good deal more than TBS (who are just rated as "very" in that regard). So, I guess that I need to start my own basic cable channel.

Next up is "What does your profile picture reveal about your personality?"...

So very wordy! No bullet points this time. The second sentence reads, "You are a very goal-oriented person." Since his goal in most of the films is primarily "Get this werewolf curse removed," Talbot never really accomplishes much. It also says that "others admire you because you know well how the wind blows," which is not saying much to someone with fur all over his arms. All he has to do is hold one up in the air and figure that out pretty quickly. Finally, as for rising "like a star in the heavens," this guy already has a complex regarding the full moon; don't get him started on constellations as well.

Lastly, we have "Analyze Your Face!" Yeah, damn it! Analyze your stupid face already! You've been wasting your time with all of these other dopey face analysis tests that you totally forgot to analyze your face!

I know it is only coincidence, but the combination of my usage of a monster picture and the words at the bottom of the resulting graphic tying into Lady Gaga (who calls her fans "little monsters") was just too much for me. Regarding the information above, anyone that knows me will automatically discount the mental age of 34 years (but then again, this is based on dear Wolfie Talbot), and once more, the photo of a monster who looks considerably aged in comparison but still shears my real age by more than half is suspect. The two best points close the action. While I know that one can cut an athletic figure, and also know a great many athletes who are charismatic, I have never known charisma itself to be identified as directly athletic. "He had a charisma that was, for complete lack of a far better term, athletic." Yeah, doesn't work. Finally, there is the complete assessment at the end: "Only angels look like this." Well, maybe in dog heaven.

This was by no means an exhaustive look at the variety of utterly stupid, time-wasting tests to be found on Facebook, along with the companies that are mainly looking to capture your personal information to most likely sell to marketing firms, advertisers, etc. There are likely so many more tests to be tried, but I just kind of wore myself out doing the ones that I did, though I was delighted by the results. I will probably need to scrub my computer history pretty well after this, and will need to dig into my Facebook settings to shut down further permissions for Nametests and whoever else has hooked up to my information in this span.

Looking back on all of this fluff, especially after riffing on Richard Spencer back there, it reminds me that I had at one point considered putting up a snap of Spencer's favorite president, Agent Orange, as my profile pic. But then I really didn't want to taint my Facebook page with his mug any more than I already had after tearing him apart in my posts, nor did I want that "haven't showered for a fortnight" feeling one might get in having to pretend that Trump's picture is relatable to your own. Certainly, the results would have been possibly even more ridiculous than using swamp creatures and sea monsters instead, but those are noble cryptids that deserve our love and understanding. 

I wouldn't never even apply the term "cryptid" to a demagogue anyway, so there is no comparison. Demagogues are a known lot who have been studied non-stop for decade after decade, and their worthless habits are completely known even if a massive proportion of the world still falls for their bullshit without pause every time. The only real word for their kind is simply... douchebag. And sadly, more than ever it seems they are a species that will never go extinct; they just disappear into the wild for a spell. You can't even test for it.

This Week in Rixflix #7: April 21-27, 2017

I was cloaked in sadness throughout last week but in the first five days, it was in purely trivial ways. For the past eight weeks, Jen and I have both been entranced by Ryan Murphy's sublime FX series, Feud: Bette and Joan. The final episode on Sunday was the equal of the rest that preceded it, and left me with a great desire to watch the entire series as a whole immediately, especially knowing that the Feud franchise will move on to an entirely different arc next season (much in the way that Murphy transforms American Horror Story each year). The second series will be called Feud: Charles and Diana, a subject that intrigues me far, far less simply because it will be mostly free of cinema references, apart from a likely few regarding Diana's lover, Dodi Fayed, who was a film producer. Most especially, it will be free of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, and who wants that? Honestly, could we just convince Murphy to do a remake of The Golden Girls with Jessica Lange's Crawford and Susan Sarandon's Davis hanging out at a retirement home with Kathy Bates' Joan Blondell and Catherine Zeta-Jones' Olivia De Havilland?

Heartbroken enough already (Feud is just that fantastic, people), I then had to face the dreaded series finale of my beloved Bates Motel after a marvelous five-year run. The show had constantly astounded me by repeatedly thwarting my expectations at nearly every turn. I have also been quite pleased that someone produced such a fine showcase for the talents of two personal favorites, Vera Farmiga and Nestor Carbonell (who also got the chance to direct a trio of episodes in the series). The final episode was quite the downer for me, having to finally say goodbye to these characters, but luckily the time went by so fast it was almost like it never happened when the credits started to roll. I came into the series doubting highly the placement of Freddie Highmore in the role of Norman Bates, but now I doubt instead that I will ever be able to watch him in anything else without thinking of this show. (Luckily, he usually speaks in his British accent elsewhere, so he won't sound like Norman in most other things.) He may not be Anthony Perkins, but that was kind of the point of the entire show: to pay tribute to a true classic at the same time that they took the story in entirely new and even deeper, darker directions. Goodbye, dear Norma(n)...

As always, my ability to write and create is tied directly to my health. If I am even relatively healthy, I tend to concentrate on writing most of the time, and the result is that I will balance everything out by watching less films. On the flip side, if I am watching more films per day, that means I probably don't feel well enough to sit at my desk. The bulk of the past week's watch-load (16 of the films out of 23 seen in total) was compiled over the first three days, as I found it hard to sit long on Friday and Saturday due to some increased leg pain I was experiencing after physical therapy the preceding Thursday. By Sunday and the next PT visit, it started to work itself out to where I gained extra mobility again. I was able to spend the last three days comfortable enough to finish a handful of projects and jumpstart some others (much to the relief of my buddy Aaron, with whom I write a pair of blogs, and who has been awaiting my return to a regular pace of creation).

Finally, the real sadness hit on Wednesday, when it was announced to the world that director Jonathan Demme had died from cancer at age 73. While Demme directed a wide variety of features, genres, and documentaries in his career since he started as a screenwriter for Roger Corman in the early '70s, he is highly placed in my personal pantheon for directing four films: Melvin and Howard (1980), Stop Making Sense (1984, the greatest and most inventively filmed concert feature ever), Something Wild (1986) and, of course, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), for which he won the Best Director Oscar. (Sadly, it was his only Oscar nomination, even though Lambs won all of the major categories that year.) Each of these titles is so intricately tied to my personal history that I will never do without owning and watching them for the rest of my life.

I garnered an even greater appreciation for Demme in his post-Lambs career when he started a working friendship with the English singer-songwriter, Robyn Hitchcock. While the direction of various music videos has been a staple throughout his career, Demme flexed his feature-length music documentary muscles yet again in 1998 with Storefront Hitchcock. True to the film's title, Demme quite literally placed the eccentric musician behind a large storefront window on a street in New York, and has Hitchcock play a mostly acoustic concert to a small and appreciate crowd while confused passers-by look in through the window and wonder what is going on inside, unaware they are being caught on film.

The film's release was just another instance where the connections between all of the things I love seem to grow tighter. By the time Storefront Hitchcock was released, I already owned nearly 20 albums of Hitchcock music (and over 35 by now), including his early work with his seminal late '70s band, the Soft Boys, his many albums with his next band, the Egyptians itself featuring two former members of the Soft Boys), and Robyn's ever imaginative solo work. I couldn't believe my luck that Robyn had met up with Demme, as I had always hoped Hitchcock would receive greater exposure to his music from the general public. This proved to be a problem for a couple of reasons. Hitchcock's music – odd, alternately whimsical and dark, and rife with deeply British phrases and references – is definitely an acquired taste and perhaps not greatly suited to the shorter attention spans of the majority of Americans. Also, while Storefront Hitchcock was well received by critics and is a quite perfect spotlight on Hitchcock's singularly surreal wit and artistry (just as much for his ad-libbed, non sequitur-laden monologues between songs as for the music itself), the film did not get much of a theatrical release in America. And I am still the only person that I know who has ever seen it, though I have recommended it to a select few.

When I heard Jonathan Demme died, I thought immediately about which film I was likely to watch first, knowing full well that I was bound to launch into a film-watching mourning period. The usual suspects of his filmography that I listed above are all bound to be hit during this period, but the one that I jumped to throwing in the DVD player without even pausing was Storefront Hitchcock. In the middle of that same night, having gotten up briefly around 3:00 a.m., I was scanning the cable channels to see what was showing, and found another Oscar-winner of Demme's, Philadelphia, which was about to air on Starz in about 90 minutes. Since I had not seen Philadelphia since it was released to theatres in 1993 (it was his first narrative feature after Lambs), that seemed to naturally be the next choice to watch again.

As of this writing, I am deep into next week's films. I have watched 13 more Demme-directed films since I saw Philadelphia last Thursday afternoon. (And I have two more to watch tomorrow, the start of the next cycle for me.) Some of these films will be discussed in the next This Week in Rixflix. There will be so much Demme flavor in fact, that it is quite likely the entire thing will be subtitled as a special All-Demme Issue. It's the very least the great man deserves for what he has meant to me, especially in those four films. Rest in peace, old chum. I wish that you had made another 34 features.

This week's feature-length film count: 23; 14 first-time viewings and 9 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length film: Philadelphia (1993) – 8/9
Lowest rated feature films: Frankenstein 1970 and My World Dies Screaming [aka Terror in the Haunted House (both 1958) – 4/9
Average films per day in April thus far: 2.55
Average films per day in 2017 thus far: 3.05

Janie (1944) Dir.: Michael Curtiz – In the interest of filling in the gaps in the filmographies of some of my favorite directors, I tracked down two smaller films by the legendary Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) this past week. The first that I watched, Stolen Holiday (1937) starring Kay Francis and Claude Rains, was the better film (though no great shakes itself), but his 1944 feature Janie proved to be the more interesting one overall. Janie is kind of a jaw-dropper of a movie, if only because I wondered constantly why I had never seen this quite odd film before or even heard of it.

Starring Warner Bros. then-ingenue Joyce Reynolds as the title character, Janie is one of those wartime flag-wavers, meant to lift the spirits of both families at home and troops abroad during the conflict. Janie is a senior in high school who even has a steady boyfriend, the obnoxious Scooper Nolan... or at least he thinks they are going steady. The problem is that she, as well as all of her girlfriends, are just bonkers about the soldiers on leave in her small town, which lies conveniently near a military camp. The film is based on a play, and sure enough, most of the action takes place in the large family room and entrance to her parents' home, with about a hundred soldiers, neighbors, teenagers, and eventually an entire Army jeep coming and going non-stop through the many doors and windows of the place throughout the story. (There are just a couple of brief forays to other locations to make the film a little less set-bound, but the home is the prime location.) Janie, both the film and the character, are almost always pitched at one level: fast and breathless, and it does become a bit of a pain trying to wrestle down in one's mind all of the characters one is encountering. After I told Jen's mom about Janie when I was done watching it, she sat through it and thought it was awful. I have seen far too many truly awful films to ever consider this to be of the same ilk, but I will agree that the film itself is not actually good.

However (and this is precisely how I sold the film to Jen's mom), there is a time capsule quality to the film that practically demands that any lover of old time cinema should give it a shot. There is the wartime propaganda angle, naturally, and then there is the small town setting, the period trappings, the radio broadcasts, and then there is the look at teenage life in the 1940s, as fabricated as it may be ultimately. There are also some interesting character actors in bigger parts in the film, such as Edward Arnold, Robert Benchley, Ann Harding, Alan Hale, and Hattie McDaniel. But the main reason for me to at least have seen it this once, despite its shabbiness, was for the several small uncredited parts in the casting that make one tilt a curious eyebrow at the proceedings. "B' western star Sunset Carson plays an army sergeant, another former western star Lane Chandler is a cop, former silent leading man Monte Blue plays another cop, Billy Benedict of the East Side Kids/Bowery Boys is a soda jerk, chanteuse and future Emergency star Julie London is in amongst the passel of teenage girls in this film, and the family's nosy neighbor is played by the very familiar Virginia Sale. Best of all are appearances by two actors known far more for other media. Future leader of the Mouseketeers, the freckle-faced Jimmie Dodd, is on hand as an army sergeant (he even gets a name for his character, Sgt. Frank Parker), and not only has a few lines, but even has a couple to sing on his own in the big dance number (Keep Your Powder Dry) at the party. Finally, a singing group called the Williams Brothers performs at that party as well, with one of the four being a very baby-faced, 17-year-old Andy Williams, who would go on to great fame for several decades through his top-rated TV show but mostly for the 100 million records he sold worldwide. Sometimes, all I need is a cast like this to make a film worthwhile, even if the film itself is mediocre. TC4P Rating: 5/9

Mechanic: Resurrection (2016) Dir.: Dennis Gansel – The first Mechanic film a couple of years ago (itself a remake of The Mechanic, an edgy starrer in 1972 for Charles Bronson) was merely an OK watch for me. Even with Jason Statham (who I find pretty reliable in even bad films), I was left wanting by the end of it. I never considered that film might have a sequel down the line, but the second in what I presume is now going to be a series for Statham and his personal brand of martial arts (really, he is kind of his own thing) left me wanting for other reasons, even if I thought the second go-around was a slightly better effort. In fact, if I could just accept this film on its own terms, I might come to believe it is a far superior effort. Those terms are: Statham might not be selected to play James Bond, but why shouldn't he have his own Bond series?

That's right... Mechanic: Resurrection plays like a frenzied, globe-trotting clip montage of all the big action scenes from a half dozen Bond films, only without the plot mechanics (see what I did there?) and appealing characters of those Bond films. We even see Statham flirt with a voluptuous female here and there, but in non-Bond fashion, he really only has eyes for one woman, a blonde teacher played by Jessica Alba, who is kidnapped from the children's shelter she runs in Cambodia in order for Statham's hitman character to be blackmailed by a former childhood chum turned villain into assassinating a variety of targets. Statham kills about 97 guys in this film, give or take, and if he doesn't, it sure feels like he does. There is no real weight to anything, especially when Statham climbs a high-rise in Sydney to kill a child trafficker by shooting him through his overhanging all-glass pool. (The more I describe this film, the more it seems like I am making the whole thing up in my head.)

Statham's character performs remarkable feats against terrible people and instead of yelling, "Hooray!" after each one, all I did was shake my head and wonder if maybe I had fallen asleep and missed all the plot between the kills. Somehow, Tommy Lee Jones shows up two-thirds of the way through, and does very little but be Tommy Lee Jones. Also, sharks are mentioned in a menacing way at least twice in the film, but after about a half-dozen scenes where Statham goes in the drink in various ways, not one damn shark shows up at all. The film cost $40 million, looks like about $20 million, and made $125 million. There will no doubt be a third film in the Mechanic series, and strangely enough, I kind of look forward to watching it, if only to confirm that I am not crazy enough to imagine this one. TC4P Rating: 5/9, but kind of wavering towards 6/9 just for pure chutzpah.

Autumn Leaves (1956) Dir.: Robert Aldrich – Chalk this watch up to the incredible influence that Feud is having on my life right now. With the concentration in the series on director Robert Aldrich as the third lead character, I have launched a small side-attack on his remaining filmography that I have not seen yet. Autumn Leaves is mentioned a couple of times in the series, mostly because it was the previous film that Joan Crawford had worked on with Aldrich. When TCM aired it last week, I did not miss my chance. Crawford is a lonely but confident woman who works as a typist at home. After she meets a man many years her junior (Cliff Robertson) and has a successful date with him, she turns him down because of the age difference. A month later, they meet again and after another date, he proposes to her. After turning him down, she then changes her mind and they get married. 

The problems start when she notices a different place of birth on the marriage license than the one he told her. When his real first wife shows up not long after (played well by Vera Miles), Robertson starts to lose control of his senses. We find out he has some serious mental issues, but exactly why I will leave it to you to find out on your own viewing of this surprisingly tense drama. Honestly, I just thought I would be watching a straight romance with Crawford paired up with a younger leading man, and never considered this had some noirish aspects to it. The big reveal still came out as pretty shocking to me here in 2017, so that will tell how little I could have anticipated it in a Hollywood feature in 1956. Absolutely worthwhile, and Crawford is really grand in it. Aldrich knew exactly how to use her in a sympathetic fashion, something he proved in Baby Jane down the road. TC4P Rating: 7/9

Prelude to War [Why We Fight, Pt. 1] (1942) Dir.: Frank Capra – When I took in a viewing of the Netflix documentary, Five Came Back, the previous week, I did not realize it was going to reawaken my interest in the Hollywood-produced World War II propaganda films that form the basis of the doc. My pal Aaron, who watched it on his own, pointed out to me that Netflix was also streaming several of the titles that are talked about in Five Came Back, a marvelous piece that concentrates on five famous directors who ended up taking part in America's war effort: John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, and George Stevens. One of the films on Netflix is Prelude to War, the first part of a series titled Why We Fight. Of the seven features* that comprise the Why We Fight series, all of them are credited as having been directed or co-directed by Capra, and his particular form of highly manipulative, emotional filmmaking comes in handy for him as he uses the lead film to convince Americans exactly why we had joined the fight in Europe and the Pacific theatre.

I am not knocking his methods, because America needed to engage in this particular fight at the time to stop the creeping terror of fascism across the world. (Something we need to start taking care of right now as well, because it's not just a-comin'... it really is knocking at the door, and does in fact have its puppet sitting in the Oval Office.) But this film especially in the series is so highly jingoistic and downright racist in its attitude that it is a bit rough for a modern progressive such as I am to get through it without either cringing or shaking my head. However, I am also a realist and know this is just how it was at the time, especially when our own country was being bombed. But just like today, where the real news has been branded as "fake news" by those who would subvert the constitution and sweep a nationalist agenda into America by manufacturing their own fake news posing as real news (or as they themselves term it, "alternative facts"), Capra had to do battle with the other side's own propaganda machines, who were more than proficient at using the film camera to manipulate the public to believe in, fear and serve their twisted agendas. (And if you perceive that I just directly compared the Alt-White House's methods to the Nazis... Congratulations. You win a prize, kid. And they really haven't done much to dissuade such comparisons...)

While based in reality, these films are not exactly documentaries, and Five Came Back will prove the case for some of them, as you see films by other directors – Huston quite notably – where they arrived too late for the action and had to get the soldiers to recreate battle scenes for the cameras. Prelude is more of an opening salvo for Capra's own series, and is more concerned with leading in to the other films in the series while also explaining how we got to the point of another global war. It declares that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 is the true start of WWII, though most historians usually point to the reigniting of hostilities between China and Japan in 1937 as the beginnings of the Second Sino-Japanese War that leads up to the start of WWII in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and had war declared on them by England and France. Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia is also explored, but Hitler is only tackled in a small way, as the second film, The Nazis Strike, picks the narrative up there. Capra, though, does incorporate footage from Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, but subverts the images using his narrator, Walter Huston. Regardless of their status as propaganda, these films are vital to understanding what America and the world went through in the 1940s and really should be must sees for every citizen. Especially for the ones who have taken us dangerously near reliving everything again, only this time from the other side. TC4P Rating: 7/9

Genius (2015) Dir.: Michael Grandage – I read more than one review for Genius that remarked on how mistaken the filmmakers were by overestimating just how interesting it was to watch a professional editor redline text for two hours. Well, excuse me, but that sounds like a perfectly delightful time for me. If the film were comprised of nothing but such activity, that is. What's wrong with that concept? Genius is a biographical sketch of two famed figures – the novelist Thomas Wolfe, and his first true editor, Maxwell Perkins – coming together at the exact point of their greatest collaboration, the manuscript for Wolfe's epically conceived debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Perkins had to learn to tame the flamboyant Wolfe just enough to convince the young, eager writer to excise over 60,000 words from the draft. The film carries through with their relationship to Wolfe's untimely end, after Wolfe had left Perkins following endless creative disputes over the years.

I was a good chunk of the way through Genius before it hit me that of the seven real, very American primary characters in the film, only one was played by an American (Laura Linney, essaying Perkins' wife, Louise Saunders). Colin Firth is as steady as he can be as the nearly unflappable Perkins, who already has some practice in dealing with edgy writers pre-Wolfe through his exploits with F. Scott Fitzgerald (Guy Pearce) and his wife Zelda (Vanessa Kirby). Along the way, Wolfe meets up with Ernest Hemingway (Dominic West), while Nicole Kidman plays Wolfe's lover, Aline Bernstein. Wolfe himself is embodied fairly well by Jude Law, who might be a tad too old to play Wolfe at the age of 28-29 when the film starts (Law was 41 during filming), but still has a buoyancy and charisma to his performance to carry it over just fine. In fact, Law might have a little too much buoyancy, as he goes a little over the top here and there. But since when did Thomas Wolfe and over the top not go together? While I didn't think the film was great by any means, Firth is always enjoyable, the cast is mostly game (I love Pearce in everything that isn't meant to be a summer blockbuster, and this might be my favorite role for West, though it is a "blink and you miss it" part), and director Grandage drapes everything in a hazy nostalgia that does somewhat downplay what was really going on in America at the time. You know, outside of the office of an editor. TC4P Rating: 6/9

[*Note: there were technically eight Why We Fight films, as The Battle of Russia (1943) was released in two parts, though the full film is merely just over 76 minutes long.]

Face Analysis Face-Off: Part the First

If you are like me at all, you have tried to ignore the ceaseless array of online personality tests that infest Facebook like bedbugs in a Motel 6 mattress pad. You have also, if you are like me at all, absolutely failed in avoiding taking any more of those tests. My one saving grace is that I rarely encounter or even seek out one of these tests on my own. And so I take them very infrequently.

But just how do I take (or even find) such tests on those "infrequent" occasions? Obviously, because one of my friends or acquaintances on Facebook had already taken the test first. Of course, for me to even stop and click the "Find Out Now" tab (or other such shiny, candy-coated buttons that entice you to disrupt whatever flow you had going), the quiz's subject matter has to be just interesting enough where I wouldn't mind finding out what an entirely robotic system has to say about some aspect of my personality derived solely by the spare (and often intentionally) misleading information I have posted on Facebook. 

My profile picture is rarely of my own face, so that either negates or at least perverts or stunts the results of any tests based on photo usage, and I am too self-conscious or defensive to actually post the straight results I might obtain from personality quizzes based on multiple choice selections. There is also the scary proposition of exactly what the quiz sites are gathering from your Facebook page, and/or how they are going to use that information ultimately. Most such sites are now upfront with precisely which info they will be gathering once you approve the link between their site and your page, but it is still a daunting thought as to what the nefarious ends are as to why they would ever want it. However reticent I might be to take part in such entertainment after weighing the pros and cons, I will admit that it can be completely fun to take such tests, if only to kill a few minutes of the day in completely trivial and mind-numbing brain-rot. And so, should the mood strike me, I engage readily with them at a moment's notice without hesitation. 

A couple of weeks back, my friend Amber – who just so happens to be the wife of my writing partner and erstwhile pal who most closely shares my cinematic madness, Aaron – had taken an online game called "Which Nationality Do You Resemble Most?" The simple text for the test reads, "Let us analyze your face and discover which country suits you best! Click here!" The test takes a look at your profile picture and in just a handful of seconds, spits out the result, and if you thought such results might be fairly accurate, then you have never taken one of these stupid things before.

For Amber's go at determining her possible nationality, the testing site grabbed her current profile photo, which was a recent family portrait she and Aaron had taken to include the most recent addition to their little family of four, their newborn daughter roughly six months in age. (I am a baby-hater by instinct, but even I admit the little goof is pretty damn adorable.) Yes, Amber was in her own photo on her own page, but the test did not take into account the name or sex of the owner of the participating Facebook page, and instead latched on to the most prominent visage in the quartet: that of her husband Aaron (while still retaining her name in the reply)...

This result brought great joy to his wife, who posted the result with the only text being the word "Ha" followed by triple exclamation points. While Amber and Aaron have a good deal in common (as some married couples do), they most definitely do not look like each other at all. Nor are the pair even relatable in terms of height, Aaron being taller than even 6-foot me, and Amber being far shorter. As to the results, the test took a look at Aaron's face and declared, "Amber, according to our face analysis, your nationality is: Canadian." And to back up its findings, the Nametests site added a graphic that gave an accuracy rate of 85%.

Amber and Aaron are, like myself and my own wife, former lifelong residents of Anchorage, Alaska, which is as the crow flies, about 300 miles away from the Canadian border, and 500 miles if you are actually driving from our hometown to Dawson in the Yukon Territory, the first Canadian city after crossing said border. (I will not get into flight specifics here of traveling to other places to reach the Great White North in shorter distances; just trying to set a standard. And I use the word "city" to describe a place that shows up on the majority of maps without needing to use an electron microscope to find your idiotic town with a population of 46.) So, while we exist at roughly the same latitudes as Canadians, pretty much experiencing the same seasons, etc., in Alaska, we are still Americans. Still, I can see a measure of the stereotypical Canadian openness and politeness in Aaron's picture, and so the result is not as far off as it could have been.

So, let's move on now to those "could-have-beens," shall we?

Naturally, I just had to take this test, and for one very good reason: my current profile pic was none other than King Kong from his most recent film, Kong: Skull Island. I was dying to find out what the result would be, and honestly, I was ready for a wide variety of possible outcomes from this, including wondering just how racist the creators of the quiz might be. That I was itching to immediately publish the results is an understatement. And the answer?

Wow... Had the creators of this quiz recently seen the 1961 British horror film, Konga? That's the most prominent English ape flick of comparable sizing. (This is not taking into account international co-productions of recent vintage.) For real 'Mercans (aka the real snowflakes), the notion that Kong is not considered 100% American here might upset them greatly and get them reaching for their AKs. But, of course, a great cross-section of them also deny the American Civil War was primarily fought over slavery, so what the fuck do they know? They would also miss out on the fact that Kong in the original 1933 (and 1976... and 2005) version was straight up attacked and then kidnapped from his island home, transported in the hold of a massive ship to America, made to perform onstage in bound slave-like fashion for the delight of human beings, attempted to escape, and then was paid back for this mistreatment by being shot up by human weaponry, and finally, we are shown the image of his bloody, broken body strewn across the streets of New York. I am pretty certain Kong never would have considered himself an American, because being an ape (even a gigantic one with a serious jonesing for hot blonde women), he doesn't know from nationality. So, being called English instead of American is not going to upset him in the least.

This got me thinking, though, about how other monsters would come out nationality-wise via the same dopey test. To establish a base using a common image, I first jumped to Peter Jackson's version of King Kong from 2005. I thought the result might be roughly similar, but was told a very different origin story about this big guy:

Like any of these results, read into it what you will, but the 98% accuracy rating seems pretty definitive... doesn't it? It doesn't? Why a gorilla-like creature would be thought to have come from a continent entirely free from great apes is beyond me (though South America does possess a wide variety of what are termed New World monkeys), but then again, this test is not exactly giving us an actual biological analysis. In fact, I can't figure out what the hell it is using as a basis. The photo shows us three boxed points on each image as an example of how it determines the results, but the boxes are used in the images via a template, with said box trio configured in the same exact positions on each profile picture. If it is actually using those three points on each image, and if the selection is merely based on color points in the photo and not true physical characteristics, I do not know. (And, of course, this is all just very silly and never meant to be even mildly analyzed in reverse, like any test you might take on a social media platform...)

Aaron had seen his wife's post and taken the test himself, which he then posted on his own Facebook page. His profile pic, in contrast to mine, was of Godzilla. Aaron and I are both huge kaiju fans, so the fact that we were lined up with the two greatest figures of the genre at the same time in our profile pics is no real surprise. We often have header images of monster flicks and posters, or regularly post monster pictures for the heck of it on our Facebook pages. Myself, I was a bit jealous not having tried the Big G myself. While the 1933 Kong is my very favorite movie of all time, Godzilla is my absolute fave large-scale monster. (More on my fave human-sized "creature" is coming right up...) But Aaron had Godzilla in place already, and set down the comment point for the remainder of this exercise. Aaron's post had these words: "I am the only one this test has been accurate for."

So, why did Godzilla come out as Japanese? Is the coding for the test set to recognize certain pop cultures figures like Godzilla and know he is of Japanese origin? Or was there a more racial component to the result? One can't help but see one of the template red boxes in the image is directly over one of his eyes. And how is that portrayed? Is it reading his eyes as being slanted at a certain angle that certain citizens would not mistake for anything but of Asian origin? On which physical features does this test use to determine its results, if indeed it is doing so at all, and not just rolling the dice, so to speak? Whatever the algorithms are, the test seems more unsure of the Godzilla result than the last Kong one, giving it only 85% accuracy.

As I said, Aaron's post became ground zero for the rest of this discussion, especially since he had tagged me in the post itself so it appears on my own home page. I commented on his post with my first two Kong results back to back. Then, after a brief span, I switched out my profile pic once more. This required, it seemed, the deletion of the previous profile pic entirely, otherwise the Nametests site would continue to employ the old picture instead. After letting it stew for a while and cleaned out my cache as well, I finally got a result for my new profile pic, which just happened to be that more human-sized "creature" I mentioned a few paragraphs ago...

Once more, read into this what you will as far as how it determines the result. Or is it just swinging wildly, and letting the user read into the answer instead? It seems most likely. Here, I posted on my comment, "Boy, they are off across a whole ocean and a continent..." since the Creature from the Black Lagoon's lagoon is located deep down the Amazon river.

I next wanted to see what it would do with a completely non-humanoid face and figure, and so a few hours later (after clearing everything under the sun out of my browser again), I posted the result for another favorite monster of mine – this time of the prehistoric sea slug variety – a certain "Monster that Challenged the World". There was a small problem though...

The Nametests site could not make out the image I posted, even though I had been making all of my profile pics the same size. This time, it looks like they used a microscope to read the picture. For once and only once in this article, I have created a mockup of the result (though without wasting time in blending the images together in the middle). Here is the result for the "Monster"...

Since I am Swedish on my dad's side, this made me laugh uproariously, and especially because it is the most gratuitously creepy of the monster images I had used to that point. Later that evening, I ran into a bigger problem. The Nametests site was possibly getting tired of my shenanigans (though it is more likely to have been coincidence). Whatever happened, after I had switched my profile to an image of Lon Chaney, Jr.'s Wolfman character, the system kept recognizing the Creature from the Black Lagoon instead, even though I had deleted the image from Facebook and its history from my browser and cache. I even tried to get a Wolfman result on my phone, but wasn't able to until early the next day, after about 20 tries. And I was not displeased with the final version, though once the game let the Wolfman in, it was going to prove remarkably hard to keep him away...

Aaron, not to be outdone, went another route with his second picture. Being a dedicated fan of the Master, John Carpenter, he changed his profile pic to one of the aliens from They Live, after their hideous countenances have been revealed to Rowdy Roddy Piper with his special sunglasses. More possible tension is likewise revealed by the test result...

Aaron was worried what it said about the makers of the game and their possible contempt for Argentinians; I said it probably had something more to do with their contempt for aliens. I commented on Aaron's post that "I can see this is going to become a great, new way of life for us," but then the test kept doggedly hanging onto an old image after I deleted it. This time, it was the Wolfman, but instead of seeing the exact same picture, I started getting other nations as results. I had switched my profile to that of Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, but the Wolfman returned, this time as...

At this juncture, I knew the game was rigged. First off, there is no way that a Wolfman could get trapped in a mineshaft. It was becoming more clear gradually that this test was just hit or miss. There couldn't be any reason to it. After several hours of waiting, I was able to finally get a hit on the Dracula picture...

Now this was cool... I was very accepting of the result (speaking for my own partial peeps), even though Romania is a good distance away from Sweden. (Lugosi was Hungarian, but was actually born quite near Transylvania in an area that was then part of the Kingdom of Hungary but is now part of Romania) They at least got the continent correct. I switched to yet another image, going the alien route this time, by using the crazy big-eyed and big-headed costumes from Invasion of the Saucer Men. However, while Dracula is most renowned for coming back from the dead over and over again, it was the Wolfman who was still getting in my way. And wouldn't you know it, he has now been revealed to be totally in it with Trump's cohorts...

In fact, he may have rigged the election for Cheeto the Toddler. I kept trying to get the Saucer Men to show up, but it wasn't until three days later that I finally got the Wolfman to disappear when I took the test. To my delight, I was to discover that my pal Aaron (in his human guise) and the Saucer Men were probably one and the same...

I rather gave up on the Monster Nationality sport at that time, mostly due to being distracted by health appointments and family activities. I did try the test once more on my phone a couple of days later to see if the result was the same, but the Wolfman reappeared yet again. He had gone back to his Italian roots for some reason (or no reason at all). Finally, this morning, I decided to give the game one last try, still using the Saucer Men profile pic. This time, the little buggers shifted across the Pacific and were now apparently related to Aaron's Godzilla...

This time, the test's algorithms were far more sure about the Saucer Men being from Japan than it was about Godzilla (96% to 85%), but truly, it was just all silliness down the line. It's really what you want from one of these games, especially when you are just killing time. But I would still really love to learn what the creators of this particular quiz did to get these results.

Meanwhile, something else happened when the Wolfman mysteriously returned for the fourth time...

[To be continued soon...]