Rant #2,370: Ob-la-Di, Ob-la-Da (Life Goes On)

Yes, life does go on in the age of the coronavirus.

In fact, in a few minutes, I have to go to the local lab and get my blood taken for a future doctor's visit.

I then have to go and get my allergy shot, something that I was supposed to do on Saturday, but because of what is going on, was postponed until this morning.

I haven't been outside every day since the pandemic set in, but I have ventured outside on most days, even for a little while, and I see people driving their cars, walking their dogs, jogging, and taking the family out to stretch their legs.

I believe it is the patriotic thing to do.

I know that staying inside and practicing "social distancing"--already this year's winner of the "buzz-term" award--is what we are supposed to be doing, but going outside and doing your thing, even for a few minutes, well, I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

And while you are inside, what is there to do?

I have watched a couple of movies, as I always do on down time, and since life does go on, even in the era of the coronavirus, I would like to briefly tell you about two of them.

One of the films I watched was the 1975 film "Abduction," a 1875 movie that I remember seeing in the movie theater way back when that touched on the hot-button topic of the moment, the real-life abduction of heiress Patricia Hearst and her eventual induction into the Symbionese Liberation Army.

You might remember how much of a stir that caused, this wealthy heiress kidnapped from her home, savaged upon by her captors, and little by little, broken by them, through abuse that was real, You name it, they did it to her, and she finally broke through a case of the Stockholm Syndrome, where those abducted in one way or another actually eventually look up to their captors, and sometimes even join in their exploits.

Patricia Hearst did just that, eventually serving jail time for her misdeeds, but she then resurrected her life, became something of a pop figure, and kind of faded into oblivion.

The film is a fictional account of much of this, taking liberties all over the place, and the film is as amateurish as could be, sensationalizing the subject rather than making us understand how such a thing could actually happen.

Written by Kent Carroll and Harrison James and directed by Joseph Zito, and starring Judith-Marie Bergan and Leif Erickson, the film does show the brutality of what went on, but it demonstrates this brutality in a sexploitation sort of way, trying to engage the viewer into the horror of how this young woman was broken down, but actually using the sex scenes almost as a stepping stone to the next sex scene.

While it kind of gets its point across, by the end of the film, the viewer is left pretty hollow--was this film trying to show what can happen in a situation like this, or did it exist to show off the "talents" of Bergan, some shown on screen in an R-rated way?

You can see this film at https://youtu.be/Ipv1w1actg8

A much better film that I viewed this weekend was a movie that I have wanted to see for decades, and finally found available for viewing.

It is 1970's "The Honeymoon Killers," another film based on fact that takes as many liberties with its subject matter asd the previous film I described did, but uses what it has to maximum effect.

Written by Leonard Kastle and directed by kastle, Donald Volkman, and in some scenes, a very young Martin Scorcese, the movie, starring Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco, is based on the notorious year-long murder spree that got a lot of press in the post-war 1940s, where a philanderer and his lover set up phony marriages and then murdered the unsuspecting lonely hearts that they had set up.

Shot in black and white and moved up to the late 1960s, the movie is so low-fi that it addes to the brutality of these two losers, with Lo Bianco playing the hustler who preyed on these lonely heart women, and Stoler playing his accomplice, who got involved with this so-called Lothario because, he, too, philandered her.

But there was an attraction between the two characters that made this sort of crime-ridden "Batman and Robin" pair attached to each other with glue.

Yes, the film is somewhat exploitive in nature, but the script and the actors bring out that these two were truly losers, who eventually got pleasure out of not only philandering these lonely hearts, but then doing away with them. They were lonely hearts themselves, but when encountering others like them, they had to get rid of them to move on with their own lives.

Both LoBianco and Stoler are completely believeable as this wretched pair, with literal smarm dripping off of them in every scene.

This is an excellent movie to pass nearly two hours, and I would highly, highly recommend it. You can see this film in its entirety at https://youtu.be/nN9vtTx8xqQ

So yes, I am trying to keep busy

It isn't easy, but yes, life goes on, and it should for you too.

Let's not let this thing really get us--let us get it.