The Law and the Fist, Poland, 1964

At the end of World War Two, Poland's western border shifted west into what had been German territory. In this movie, a group of men, most of them concentration camp survivors, go to an abandoned German town ostensibly to prepare it for Polish refugees to move in. They arrive in town, meet a group of women and a drunken German waiter. They go to what had been an expensive hotel and drink and party as it becomes clear to the hero, a former resistance fighter, that they're there to loot the place.

A Polish action film. I can sort of understand it being compared to an American western but that may be a little misleading.

With an off-camera rape, two or three murders and a long gun fight. The men are armed with German Walther P-38s, Soviet Nagant revolvers and a German submachine gun.

Directed by Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skorzewski.

Black and white, 90 minutes.

Al Pacino, Barry Levinson, Joe Paterno

If I had children I wouldn't leave them alone with anyone from Penn State.

Long ago, I was looking at a book on screenwriting. It argued that, in film, characters had to have a clear, objective motive for their actions. Psychological reasons weren't enough.

For example, if you were making a movie about disgraced Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, his motive for covering up Jerry Sandusky's sex crimes against children would be to keep the money rolling in. Paterno made millions every year, not just in salary from the university but from endorsements, apparel contracts, a share of TV and radio revenue and fees for his own media appearances.

This new made-for-HBO movie should start with a scene of Paterno about to sign a contract for a big endorsement deal. He asks his lawyer about something in the contract.

"Oh, that's just the morals clause," the lawyer explains. "The contract will be canceled if there's any scandal involving, for example, the rape of a child."

Melody J. Miller

I read an article in Variety about the made-for-HBO movie about Paterno. Barry Levinson directed, starring Al Pacino as callous, money-grubbing Paterno. I was pleasantly surprised that they hadn't been flooded with comments from simian sports fans moronically defending "Joe Pa".  I checked back later and there was a long comment written by someone calling herself Melody J. Miller.

I suppose there's more than one Melody J. Miller in the world, but according to melodyjmiller.com, she was a senior aid to Ted Kennedy and was a spokesman for the Kennedy clan, served on some committee at Penn State with Paterno that named their library after him, and now she's posting crap on the internet defending that degenerate.

She wrote in her comment:

...Joe was an old world Italian Catholic whom other men did not tell dirty jokes. He didn’t want to hear that kind of stuff and would throw up his hands in protest and walk away. So when he was told in a less then specific and halting way that Sandusky had been heard doing something with a boy in the locker room shower, he didn’t really understand exactly what he was being told, but reported it up the line to the Athletic Director as the rules dictated. It was only after he had been fired and was sitting in his living room reading the indictment that he turned and asked his sons “What does sodomy mean?”

This was after Miller gushed over Paterno urging football players to "get a good education".

Paterno himself said in an interview that he didn't understand what they were telling him about Sandusky because he didn't know you could rape a boy. He was a Catholic. He must have been aware of the massive sex abuse scandal in the church. What did that idiot think they were talking about?

Looking at other scandals at universities over the years, it's incredible how servile college students are. Students at one school staged a huge demonstration in support of their university president when he was arrested for making obscene phone calls from his office. They begged him not to resign. He had phoned a woman who advertised her services as a babysitter and told her had preschoolers locked in cages in his basement. He said he only let them out of their cages for to have sex with them.

So, in a way, Penn State students rioting in Paterno's defense didn't seem that surprising. Like maybe it wasn't necessarily because they were degenerate scum who thought a few impoverished children being raped was a small price to pay for football. But then you see Penn State alumni like Melody J Miller who have no right to be so stupid defending "Joe Pa".

I watched a YouTube video of a radio talk show host talking to a girl from Penn State who worked on the college radio station. She defended "Joe Pa" because he did so much for the university. The talk show host was aghast, told her we wasn't suited to work in radio being so stupid and suggested she talk to her parents about it.

"My parents agree with me," she said.

Then her parents are stupid, too, he observed.

Sean Penn novel

Sean Penn trying to look literary.

 I've always heard that novels were easier to write than short stories. I never understood that. I finally heard an explanation that made sense---that novels just don't need to be very well-written. Read a few pages from any book by Jackie Collins or Sheldon Leonard. Their writing wouldn't be passable in a short story.

Sean Penn has written a novel. It should have been the easiest thing in the world to do. He could have written it in short, simple sentences, perhaps in a conversational style. 

But here's a paragraph from the book that appeared in a review:

“Whenever he felt these collisions of incubus and succubus, he punched his way out of the proletariat with the purposeful inputting of covert codes, thereby drawing distraction through Scottsdale deployments, dodging the ambush of innocents astray, evading the viscount vogue of Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas, or worse, falling passively into prosaic pastimes.”

Penn used to hang around with Charles Bukowski and Bukowski didn't write crap like that.

I haven't read it and I'm not going to. Maybe it's a good book, but critics are trashing it.

Becoming suspicious about the Golden Age of Television

When exactly was the Golden Age of Television? I've been watching local broadcast television again.

I used to watch Perry Mason a lot and I thought I had seen every episode. I was unhappy about it. But now I'm seeing old episodes I had never seen before----BAD episodes. There's just nothing interesting about the characters or the crimes or Perry Mason solving them. Could it be that, all these years, only the cream of the crop was in syndication?

Same with The Twilight Zone. I'm seeing episodes I have no memory of and they stink.

And I'll mention this unrelated thing. I've also been seeing a lot of shows from the 1970's. I keep seeing this kid in them. A pretty good actor. He looks very familiar but I can never place him. So each time I google the show, find that particular episode and discover that the kid is Redames Pera. He looks familiar because he played Grasshopper---Kwai Chang Caine as a tweenager---on Kung Fu, but I never quite recognize him because he doesn't have his head shaved. I saw him on Hawaii Five-0 and Night Gallery.

A Masters thesis on the PXL 2000

Toying With Obsolescence: 

Pixelvision Filmmakers and the Fisher Price PXL 2000 Camera 

by Andrea Nina McCarty 

Submitted to the Department of Comparative Media Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Abstract: This thesis is a study of the Fisher Price PXL 2000 camera and the artists and amateurs who make films and videos with this technology. The Pixelvision camera records video onto an audiocassette; its image is lowresolution, black and white. Fisher Price marketed the PXL 2000 to children in 1987, but withdrew the camera after one year. Despite its lack of commercial success, the camera became popular with avant-garde artists, amateur film- and videomakers and collectors, sparking a renewed interest in the obsolete camera. An online community has built up around the format, providing its members with information on how to modify the camera to make it compatible with contemporary digital equipment. Although Pixelvision garners little recognition from mainstream culture, the camera's hipster cachet and perceived rarity has driven up prices in the community and in auctions.

Read it here:

https://cmsw.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/146381064-Andrea-McCarty-Toying-With-Obsolescence-Pixelvision-Filmmakers-and-the-Fisher-Price-PXL-2000-Camera.pdf

Jealousy (La Jalousie) 2013

Made for 2.4 million Euros (a bit under $3 million at the current exchange rate). A French black and white movie about a failing actor who moves in with a failed actress-turned-office-worker and her daughter. The girl calls him "Daddy" but he has a girlfriend who dumps him when she realizes he's of no help to her.

This, I think, could be Woody Allen's future if he played his cards right, making little films for the cost of a TV episode. They might go over better than what he's doing now, making low budget movies that still cost too much using unnecessarily big stars. I've seen "zero budget" movies shot in New York and the actors working for free were great. There's such a glut of actors there.

Just when Mia and Ronan Farrow think they've destroyed him, Woody Allen could blossom in a new phase of his career. In this age of digital video, what could stop him?

This movie is better than anything I can imagine Allen doing. The characters weren't talking constantly. They walked around without a narrator explaining what they were doing. The little girl gave it some energy.

The thing about Allen is he gets paid whether his movies make money or not, getting fees for writing and directing. Then if one does hit it big, like Midnight in Paris, he rakes in a fortune. He has an incredible work ethic, but would he keep at it if the money dried up?

Directed by Philippe Garrel. Available on Fandor.

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln stunk

Tony Kushner who wrote the horrible horrible script.

I sat through most of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln on Netflix. It was just awful! Slow, dull, two and a half hours of phony 19th century dialog. Not entirely accurate historically. Slaves were freeing themselves at that point with or without the 13th amendment.

I thought of how much better that skit was on Saturday Night Live with Phil Hartman as Lincoln and Roseanne Barr as Mary Todd Lincoln. It was based on historical fact, too---that Lincoln and the first lady both had psychiatric issues. They were shown in a series of violent arguments, Lincoln holding her at bay at one point waving a burning torch (did that happen or am I imagining it?)

And there was Woody Allen's short play about Abraham Lincoln also based loosely on historical fact. A farmer has gone to the White House to plead with Lincoln to commute his son's death sentence. He becomes flustered when he sees the president and blurts out a nonsense question to which Lincoln gives a witty answer.

The man returns home and tells his wife what he's done.

"Maybe down deep you don't want our son's sentence commuted," she says. "Maybe you're jealous of him."

The husband denies it at first then breaks down. He's jealous of his son's farming ability.

"Yes, I admit it! I hate farming! The seeds all look alike to me! And the soil! I can never tell it apart from dirt! You, from the east, with your fancy schools! Laughing at me. Sneering. I plant turnips and corn comes up! You think that doesn't hurt a man!?"

Lincoln comes to their shack, but I don't want to give away the ending.

You can read it here.

Anyway, that Spielberg movie stunk. My mother wanted to see it but even she pleaded with me to turn it off although she wanted to see how it ended.

"How do you THINK it ends?" I said.

And this was the movie Spielberg complained almost didn't get released to theaters.

Bad Twilight Zone episode

There was this episode of The Twilight Zone I had never seen before.

"They're dolls in a dollhouse," I thought about ten seconds in.

A couple wakes up fully clothed in a strange house and finds everything is fake. The drawers don't open, there are few fake items in the refrigerator, the phone is stuck to the wall with no wiring.

It was written by Earl Hamner, Jr. The name was familiar but what did he write?

I googled him. He created the series The Waltons based on his script for the movie, Spencer's Mountain.

I learned one thing. You know how the narrator on The Waltons was supposed to be John Boy as an adult, but he had a completely different voice and spoke in a different accent? That was Earl Hamner doing the narration.

Billy McFarland, Fyre Festival

Billy McFarland's lawyers have negotiated a deal. He has to forfeit $26 million and could be sentenced to up to 40 years in prison, although prosecutors agreed to ask for 8 to 10 years.

It's unlikely he has $26 million. But that will be hanging over his head for twenty years.

What a stupid crime. He got a lot of money but how on earth did he think he could get away with it?

Martin Shkreli

Oh, and I was attacking this guy before. I don't know why. Everybody already hated him. But I should have been happy enough to post something about this---Martin Shkreli was sentenced a few days ago to seven years and he has to give the government that one-of-a-kind CD he paid a lot of money for.

Hillary Clinton obsession

From an article by Nick Pemberton on Counterpunch.org entitled "The Ghost of Hillary":

To be fair, Hillary is not the only one obsessed with Hillary. Trump and Fox News spread mad and sexist conspiracies about her. And who could blame Hillary for being obsessed with herself? Imagine waking up tomorrow as Hillary Clinton. Could anything be stranger?!

I told myself that I wasn’t going to read What Happened. Despite my obsession with Hillary Clinton, even I had my fair share by the end of the 2016 election. Yet I almost tripped over it in the library, laying out on a cart, castaway, begging to be read. My first response was, as always with Hillary, “won’t you just go away?” But there was something that beckoned me back into her arms. Hillary, as captivating as she is awkward, wooed me back.

I am far from the only man obsessed with Hillary. But what kind of man am I? Am I the bitter Bernie Bro who pours minutely over each detail of the DNC’s corruption? Am I the deplorable Trumper who sees Hillary lurking behind every conspiracy of liberalism on Fox News? Or am I the sanctimonious liberal man who bends over backwards to prove that he is a feminist through his Hillary fetish? This kind of man is so acutely portrayed in Get Out. The liberal suburban Dad proudly tells the black man he is about to slice up that he “would have voted for Obama a third time.”

Yet I wonder if there is a fourth type of man obsessed with Hillary. Someone who finds the entire political scene so farcical that he can’t help but be drawn in by somebody who is so uniquely dishonest, entitled, and oblivious.

A brain teaser from the '70's

Remember this from All In The Family? Gloria or one of her feminist friends asked them this puzzler:

A man and his son are in car wreck. The man is killed and the boy is rushed to the hospital. They rush him into emergency surgery. The doctor walks in, sees the boy and says, "I can't operate on him! He's my son!"

How could this be???

The kid isn't adopted, he's nobody's Godchild, not a step-son or anything like that.

I told this a few years ago on the internet to a teenage boy in India and a middle aged woman in Canada. Neither one could figure it out. The Indian kid was extremely bright, but I wasn't surprised that he didn't get it, but I was surprised that the woman didn't solve the puzzle immediately.

The surgeon was the kid's mother.

The woman I was chatting with was a bit embarrassed.

"'So, the parents had sex changes?'" I typed.

This came to mind when it was reported recently that 3 in ten children asked to draw a scientist drew a woman scientist. That's up from about 1% in the 1960's.

Silent movie I couldn't bear to watch

I was listening to a podcast. If I had been on a different computer, I would have played solitaire to keep my mind from wandering so I could pay attention. But I turned on the TV and watched a terrible print of a silent movie, Won in the Clouds (1928). It starred stunt pilots as diamond smugglers in Africa.

The movie was down to the last few minutes when the hero climbed out of the seat of his biplane, got up on the wing and started walking around. I think he was going to try to grab onto another plane and climb on board for some reason. I'm not sure what was happening or why.

But I turned it off. I'm sure the guy survived the stunt or they wouldn't have it in the movie, and even if he did fall to his death, he'd be dead of old age by now anyway. But I couldn't watch. Like those YouTube videos of people hanging from construction cranes and doing chin-ups on the bars. Why do they do that?

Woody Allen's movies in general

I'll tell you what I think about Woody Allen's movies.

His movies are all-verbal. Everything is verbalized either in dialog or voice-over narration. There was Alfred Hitchcock's thing about "pure cinema" by which he meant movies that were primarily visual. But Allen's movies are pure cinema as well in that they can't be translated into any other narrative form.

Remember Manhattan, the scene were Woody Allen disapproves of Diane Keaton writing movie novelizations? I don't think you could do a novelization of most of Allen's movies. I don't think you could write a coherent synopsis of half of them, especially Radio Days.

I never quite understood people who said that his early comedies had no plot and were just a series of gags. Of course they had plots. They had a structure to them. What they thought of as plotlessness gave them kind of a richness. We learned things about the future in Sleeper that you'd never get from something with a tighter storyline. His more serious movies weren't that much different. Kind of disjointed.

The time I went to Toys R Us

This was long ago. I went with some friends to Toys R Us. I shouldn't have gone with them. I looked at the Fisher-Price PXL 2000, the "toy" camcorder that recorded a low resolution black and white image onto an audio cassette tape. They sold for $100 at a time when a real camcorder cost around a thousand dollars. I wanted to buy one. My idiot friends talked me out of it. They didn't make any actual arguments against it. They just scoffed at it. I still wish I had one. They're coveted by artists. I was the only one there with a job. Why did I listen to them?

Later I went into Toys R Us. I bought a toy Mauser pistol. It was plastic painted in some sort of camouflage. It was just a few bucks. I took it home and spray painted it silver then had to put a coat of shellac on it so the silver would get all over everything. It was smaller than a real one but just big enough to serve as prop. Now you can add muzzle flashes digitally.

This isn't it but you get the idea.

Woody Allen, World Socialist Web Site

Glad to see the World Socialist Web Site coming to Woody Allen's defense.

From the article:

...Allen’s enduring reputation stems largely from his marvelous work as a stand-up comic in the 1960s and certain intriguing films he directed in the 1970s and 1980s. His movies in recent decades have been flat as a rule and lacking in urgency. But even within this overall process, there have been ups and downs, and Wonder Wheel has a bit more liveliness to it than some of Allen’s recent efforts.

First, it’s set in Brooklyn in the 1950s, in the place where—and at a time when—the director was growing up. This may help account for the fact that the characters here are less complacent and economically well-fixed.

...

Atypically, Allen has created his idea of “working class” characters and their accompanying economic woes. While the individuals are not generally endearing, there is less snobbery and less of an embalmed quality to Wonder Wheel than there has been too much of in the writer-director’s recent work. The characters may not be terribly true to reality and remain schematic, but at least they hint at reality somewhere in the distance. If the director had been able to pay more concrete and serious attention to the internal and external dilemmas of its leads, his most recent film would be a far better work.

As it is, Wonder Wheel does not take on an important existence of its own. Allen’s self-conscious touch makes itself felt here too. Timberlake’s Mickey, the only middle class character in the movie, is wise and semi-erudite, hovering dispassionately above the fray, while the talented Winslet, energetically wrestles with a part that has no genuine texture or depth. References to Eugene O’Neill’s overheated psychological dramas, in which the characters devour each other, are largely extraneous.

...

But Wonder Wheel certainly does not deserve the critical slamming it has received. The hypocrites who praised to the skies Allen films as weak as or weaker than this have suddenly discovered all his artistic failings. How convenient! Just in time to be on the “right side” of a witch-hunt.

As noted above, it’s impossible to discuss Wonder Wheel without taking up the campaign against Allen. His adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow has accused him of sexually assaulting her when she was a child. Allen strenuously denies the charges and alleges that his former lover, Mia Farrow, cooked up the assault allegation in revenge for his leaving her in favor of Soon-Yi Previn, another of Farrow’s adoptive daughters. The Connecticut State’s Attorney looked into the accusation, and decided not to press charges, while the New York Department of Social Services found “no credible evidence” to support the allegation.

Dylan Farrow has repeated her claim, backed by disreputable figures such as “human rights imperialism” crusader Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, and in the current semi-hysterical atmosphere has found new support.

The Times is leading the charge on this as on every front of the sexual misconduct campaign. A January 28 article was clearly looking for a negative answer to the question in its headline, “Can Woody Allen Work in Hollywood Again?” It observed, “Hollywood says it’s done with Harvey Weinstein, James Toback, Kevin Spacey and other figures ousted for misconduct through the #MeToo movement. But what about Woody Allen?”

The article, by Melena Ryzik and Brooks Barnes, gleefully noted that Allen’s last four films “have flopped at the North American box office, taking in a cumulative $26.9 million—roughly half of which goes to theater owners—while carrying a collective $85 million in estimated production costs, not including marketing.

“Poor reviews have played a role. But box office analysts say that women, in particular younger women, have grown increasingly determined to boycott his films since 2013, when Dylan Farrow first spoke in detail about her claims of abuse in an interview with Vanity Fair.”

The authors found a couple of Allen defenders, including actor Alec Baldwin, who has made a number of principled statements. In January, Baldwin tweeted, “Woody Allen was investigated forensically by two states (NY and CT) and no charges were filed. The renunciation of him and his work, no doubt, has some purpose. But it’s unfair and sad to me.” He added that he had worked with Allen three times “and it was one of the privileges of my career.”

Another was Cherry Jones, the Tony- and Emmy-winning actress who appears in Allen’s soon-to-be-completed movie, A Rainy Day in New York. “There are those who are comfortable in their certainty. I am not. I don’t know the truth,” she told the Times. “When we condemn by instinct our democracy is on a slippery slope.”

However, there is a much longer list of performers who have jumped on the anti-Allen bandwagon:

One of the most recent condemnations comes from Michael Caine, who won an Oscar for his role in Allen’s 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters. Caine essentially accused the filmmaker of being a pedophile.

...

Mira Sorvino wrote an open letter to Dylan Farrow for HuffPost. She expressed regret for working with Allen in his 1995 Mighty Aphrodite, despite winning an Oscar and a Golden Globe: “I will never work with him again. I am sorry it has taken me a few weeks to come out in support of you since that conversation, but it has been a process for me to own this truth and make this irrevocable break.”

Rachel Brosnahan also expressed regret about working with Allen in his Amazon TV series, Crisis in Six Scenes. Colin Firth, who starred in Allen’s 2014 Magic in the Moonlight, told the Guardian, “I wouldn't work with him again.” Hayley Atwell, whose debut role was in Allen’s 2007 film Cassandra's Dream, also told the Guardian: “I didn't know back then what I know now. Would I work with him now? No. And I stand in solidarity with his daughter and offer an apology to her if my contribution to his work has caused her suffering or made her feel dismissed in any way. It’s exciting that I can say this now and I’m not going to be blacklisted.”

It is Woody Allen who is being blacklisted. These comments are cowardly and anti-democratic, worthy of the tradition of Elia Kazan and the rest of the Hollywood informers in the 1940s and 1950s. Whatever his artistic failings, Allen has every right to make his films. The attempts by the self-proclaimed morality guardians to demolish his decades-long career are deeply shameful and will come to be seen as that in the future.

Streetcar Names Desire skit

I was going to post this under the title "An Early Draft of Blue Jasmine"? I thought Woody Allen might have written this skit, but I was mistaken---Allen never worked on Your Show of Shows. Pointing out connections where there probably aren't any seems to be sort of my thing but I don't know of any here.

Frank Oz agrees with Woody Allen on directing

"The [Muppet] characters, they’re much more high energy and they’re not in a naturalistic world. …What I did learn a lot from Jim [Henson]—who didn’t talk much—I learned over the years the best thing to do as a director is just shut the fuck up. … That was a big thing and [it’s] how to get the best out of people."

--Frank Oz

http://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/frank-oz-muppet-guys-talking/

How does Theresa May know it was Russia?

 From counterpunch.org:

Darling Nikki Haley’s clearly pissed that she was passed over for Secretary of State. She went rogue on Wednesday by grinding on the Russians over the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.  Skripal is a Russian exile and double agent. In a rabid speech before the UN, Haley reiterated British PM Theresa May’s accusation that the Skripals were poisoned with the highly toxic “Novichok” nerve agent manufactured by the Russian government.

May offered no evidence for her charge. Salisbury is just a few miles down the road from the UK’s very own chemical weapons facility at Porton Down. The Soviet’s Novichok program was tested at a research base in Nukus, Uzbekistan, which ultimately fell into US hands after the former Soviet Republic gained its independence. One of the chemists who helped develop the Novichok poisons, Vil Mirzayanov, left Russia to live in the US. The US was charged with decommissioning the facility and destroying any stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. So both the Brits and the US may have had access to Novichok, as well as any number of independent actors who could have bought the chemical on the black market.

How the UK identified the poison as a Novichok agent remains a mystery, since British researchers at Porton Down allegedly don’t have any samples and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Scientific Advisory Board (OPCW) claims that it has “insufficient information” to accurately detect and identify Novichok agents. No wonder Jeremy Corbyn warned that May had prematurely, and dangerously, leapt to blame the attack on the Russian government. Corbyn decried the “McCarthyite” hysteria sweeping Britain and sagely urged people to “keep calm.”

TV used to be pretty good

Mannix

I've been sitting up in the middle of the night watching old episodes of Mannix. I usually sleep through most of it, but that show was violent with fights and gun fights in every episode. In the opening credits we see Mike Conners practicing karate, rolling on the ground firing a gun, nearly wrecking his sporty convertible. Strangely they seem to have a lot of scenes of people running and being chased by cars.

They were less fascinated with guns back then. Guns on TV were nondescript, black silhouettes. They never said what kind they were or what kind of bullets they used. TV cop shows today are basically infomercials for the gun industry.

His secretary, Peggy.

But there was a high price to pay for shows like this. There's a long interview with James Garner on YouTube. He talked about the Rockford Files. He said that doing shows like that meant walking a lot on pavement wearing bad shoes. He had knee surgery every time the show went on hiatus. You can see him limping terribly in some episodes.

It seems like they could do what they did on M*A*S*H*. The actors didn't want to clomp around in combat boots all the time, so they wore sneakers any time their feet didn't appear in the shot.

Marlon Brando was so overweight that he refused to wear pants on movie sets so they would have to film him only from the waist up. James Garner could have refused to wear anything but nurses shoes on the set of the Rockford Files and they would just have had no choice but to not show his feet.

Michael Caine doesn't like Woody Allen anymore

Michael Caine in Blame it on Rio with 17-year-old co-star, 
described by Pauline Kael as being about incest in a disguised form.

Michael Caine was in a single Woody Allen movie over 30 years ago. It seems silly for him to announce that he'll refuse to be in another Woody Allen movie ever again, a little like Rob Schneider's announcement that he would never appear in any Mel Gibson movie. Maybe Caine should give his Oscar back.

It's not terribly impressive that Caine thinks pedophiles should be executed. Like he thinks he's putting the rest of us to shame with how firmly he's convinced that child molestation is bad.

He apparently takes Dylan Farrow's slaverings at face value. So was he calling for Woody Allen to be put to death?

The Guardian attacks Woody Allen's directing

This appeared at the bottom of an article in The Guardian on Woody Allen as director:

This article was amended on 26 February to clarify that, as Allen and Mia Farrow were not married, he married his former partner’s adopted daughter rather than his former wife’s stepdaughter.

With all the reporting done on Allen lately, they still can't get this straight? Is it really that difficult? How do you confuse an adopted daughter and a step-daughter? I don't know what the problem would be if he DID marry Mia Farrow's ex-husband's daughter from a previous marriage. Would it be a moral outrage if he married Nancy Sinatra?

The article was sort of interesting but there was nothing new about Woody Allen's directing. He does little planning, he doesn't direct actors, doesn't do a lot of retakes and works short hours.

I have no idea why he should be attacked for this. Shooting a lot of retakes isn't a moral principle.

When John Huston directed Prizzi's Honor in the 1980's, his daughter, Angelica, commented to reporters on how fast he worked---he shot retakes until he got what he wanted, then he moved on to the next shot. I've read that older directors were disgusted at directors who shot retake after retake from every conceivable angle because they had no clear idea what the finished product should look like. 

How much planning do Allen's movies need? 

It could be that directing just doesn't need to be that hard. 

There was the story Ron Howard told David Letterman about his appearance on a three-part episode of Lassie in the 1970's. They would set up the camera, the actors would take their places. They would act out the scene, the director would yell cut and they'd pick up the camera and hurry to the next scene. The one retake they filmed was at the end when the director yelled, "Don't you EVER fuck with Lassie's close-up!"

In the cases of the Woody Allen movies, Prizzi's Honor and Lassie, they were working with professional actors. But Clint Eastwood worked with inexperienced or non-actors when he made Gran Torino. He said he filmed scenes in one or two takes and that he gave the actors simple instructions then worked quickly so they wouldn't have too much time to think about it. 

I wrote elsewhere on this blog about an episode of Flipper. The ranger and his sons were kidnapped by criminals who left them stranded on an island. The younger kid forgot both his lines and the plot of the episode. The father gave the boys instructions. The kid says, "Well, what about our boat?"

"Our boat is at home," the father says very patiently.

"Oh, yeah," the kid says.

"Oh, yeah," the father says.

They didn't care. They left it in.

My Three Sons, assault rifles

How could anyone even think of spanking Ernie!

Watched another episode of My Three Sons. It seemed so strange---Ernie and his friends were running around playing with toy guns. I loved toy guns when I was a kid, but children pretending to murder each other is so disturbing at my present stage of life.

Ernie and this one kid both had Lugers. The episode was made in 1968 and the other kid stalking them had an M-16, the military version of the AR-15. It seemed like a coincidence, this being shown on the day that kids across the country were walking out of school demanding a ban on these weapons. The episode originally aired on 30 March 1968, just fourteen days after the Mi Lai massacre in Vietnam.

Ernie and the other kid take cover inside a garage or storage shed and find a couple of worn out tires. They sell the tires to get money to buy AR-15's like the other kid has. Uncle Charlie somehow notices the tires are gone and calls the police.

Ernie fears his uncle's wrath. He's in big trouble. His friend tells him that his mother protects him when his father wants to punish him. Having no mother, Ernie goes to his sister-in-law for help. He admits he took the tires. Fred MacMurray and Uncle Charlie agree the boy needs a spanking even though he's fourteen.

Instead of spanking him, Fred MacMurray takes Ernie to the police station and forces him to confess.

This seems like a terrible lesson. If he were my kid, I'd teach him not to answer questions without an attorney present. If you don't want him to become a juvenile delinquent, teach him that being charged with a crime is something to avoid like the plague. Don't make him confess to a crime when he doesn't have to just to make some point that he already figured out.

I have myself been the owner of old car tires. If they disappeared, I would wonder who would bother taking them, but I wouldn't care, and I'm not a wealthy engineer like the character Fred MacMurray was playing. What did Uncle Charlie care? Could he even drive a car? Why was it his business? If I had a kid who sold my tires, I would be surprised anyone would buy them and I would just tell him to ask before selling my junk. That boy deserved a medal for selling those tires!

Olivia de Havilland

I didn't know this and I feel funny marveling about it, but Olivia de Havilland is still alive, 101-years-old and living in Paris.

Her sister was Joan Fontaine who died in 2013. The two sisters were estranged most of their lives. Fontaine thought it was because she got married and won an Oscar before de Havilland did. If that's true, de Havilland was a horrible person.

Olivia is in the news because she's suing the makers of an anthology series called Feud. They included de Havilland as a character without her permission in an episode about the feud between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. They showed her gossiping about her friends and calling her sister a "bitch".

I did some math. For Gone with the Wind fans, here's what Melanie Hamilton would have looked like around 1940 if she hadn't died at the end of the movie:

There's still time! There's one other member of the original, credited cast of Gone with the Wind still living---Mickey Kuhn who played Ashley and Melanie's son, Beau. They could still do a sequel with the original cast. It could have elderly Beau living with his 101-year-old mother in a run-down apartment in Atlanta in 1940 living on her pension as a Confederate war widow. She died at the end of Gone with the Wind, but there are ways around that.

"Mother, I think you should see a doctor."

"I don't trust doctors, not since Dr Meade wrongly declared me dead."

"That was 1873, Mother. Dr Meade was old! He was born in the 1700's. There've been a lot of advances since then!"

"Oh---turn up the radio! They're talking about that nice Adolf Hitler again! Your father was in the Ku Klux Klan. He would have adored Hitler!"

"He's a raving madman!"

"He's just high-spirited."

Trick or Treats (1982)

I don't know what's wrong with me, but I watched this awful movie called Trick or Treats [sic] (1982). Got it on streaming video. A woman in her 30's gets a job babysitting a bratty kid on Halloween. He's a junior magician. He keeps playing practical jokes on her and she keeps falling for them. He pretends to be killed by a guillotine, to cut his finger off, to stab himself, drown in the swimming pool. Meanwhile, the kid's father has escaped from a mental hospital and coming to kill everyone.

Made by Gary Graver, a cinematographer who worked with Orson Welles and Roger Corman and directed porno films under a different name. His son plays the bratty kid. Reportedly filmed in three weeks working from 6 PM to Midnight each day in the home of one of the stars. Made for $55 thousand in 1982. It was reportedly a remake of the British film Fright starring Honor Blackman.

Which reminded me of The Naked Witch, made for an estimated $8,000 two decades earlier which is about $67,000 today. They, too, stole the basic plot from an earlier movie, but they used it simply as an excuse for a series of nude scenes, and it was only about forty minutes long if you don't count the documentary on the history of witchcraft and the travelogue of central Texas at the beginning. Trick or Treats dragged on for an hour and a half.

It ends with the kid killing his own father. They apparently didn't see this as problematic. They did it with the kid's trick guillotine, but it doesn't chop his head off. He just has blood coming out of his mouth.

It came across as an attempted comedy, but it didn't work as comedy or horror.

David Carradine and Paul Bartel have minor roles. The credits list Orson Welles as "magical consultant".

There's another David Carradine movie directed by Paul Bartel, Death Race 2000, which has been edited down to an hour for streaming video. This movie might be passable if they cut it down to twenty minutes.

Woody Allen's September (1987)

Dead Johnny Stompanato. Mob enforcer killed by an 8th grade girl.

I never understood why Lana Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane, was in trouble for sticking a knife in Johnny Stompanato. The girl deserved a medal for killing that subhuman. But, for courageously killing a mobster who was attacking her mother, the girl was made a ward of the state.

This story made its way into Woody Allen's September. Mia Farrow plays a woman who, years earlier, shot and killed her mother's abusive gangster boyfriend. Strangely, her aging movie star mother (Elaine Stritch) is now married to a physicist. Why a physicist? Does this make sense? Lana Turner married Lex Barker who played Tarzan and later a hypnotist con man. She was married eight times, never to any an academic or intellectual.

Mia Farrow's character says twice that she wants to go see "the new Kurosawa film" which sounds affected. I've been to new Kurosawa movies and I went to a Kurosawa film festival, but I referred to the movies by name. Kurosawa movies tend to be rather masculine and don't seem like something a woman traumatized by a girlhood homicide would be drawn to.

I don't think I'm giving it away here, but Mia Farrow is trying to sell the house in the movie but suddenly learns that she doesn't own it. It's her mother's property. The mother had said something in passing about giving it to her years earlier and Mia Farrow just assumed it was hers. Wasn't she paying taxes on the place all those years? It seems like she would know whether the house was in her name. It means realtors had been working and spending money trying to sell a house that wasn't hers to sell.

Allen's serious movies tend to have these peculiarities, like he doesn't quite know how the world works. I liked it in Interiors in which Diane Keaton plays a celebrity poet, something I don't think exists, but in September it's just annoying. 

Max Landis

All right, I admit it. He seems like a horrible person, but I have little reason to believe that Max Landis is a sex criminal. I should probably be happy about that.

"In Praise of the Oscars"

From an article called In Praise of the Oscars by playwright David Macaray that appeared on counterpunch.org where you can read the whole thing:

...Whereas working actors are artists applying their craft, movie stars represent a whole other breed of animal.  These people orbit their own sun.  Unfortunately, when applied to movie stars, the term “narcissism” is rendered virtually useless.  Indeed, calling movie stars “narcissists” is as inadequate as referring to the universe as “very large.”

The screenwriter William Goldman (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “All the President’s Men,” et al) described the movie star Paul Newman as being a genuinely “humble guy,” which, according to Goldman, was something you don’t often find in Hollywood.

As an example of just how humble Newman was, Goldman noted that his contract did NOT call for a minimum number of close-ups.  Apparently, most movie stars insist on having their mugs fill the screen x-number of times.  Why?  Because, well, they’re movie stars.  But not Paul Newman.  He trusted the directors to shoot the scenes however they chose.

An even “better” (which is to say “worse”) story involved a big-time actress who had the box office clout to get pretty much anything she wanted.  And what she wanted—what she insisted upon in her movie contract—was to have her rear-end prominently featured a minimum of ten times.

...

Because the Academy Awards are one of the very few “live” events we still get to see on television, every show has at least one embarrassing, unintentionally laughable, disgraceful, or cringe-worthy moment, and this year’s presentation was no exception.

Reminding us of just how gutless Hollywood’s studio executives truly are, they inserted a revolting faux-patriotic tribute to America’s military.  Not only was this segment utterly contrived and out of place, it was obviously done in order to offset the “liberal,” anti-sexist, pro-diversity theme of the evening.

It's getting harder for Israel to conceal its crimes

This is film-related. It includes discussion of an Israeli actor and the Israelis dismissing video of their crimes as "Pallywood".

An article from counterpunch.com by Jonathan Cook, "Israeli Army Lies Can No Longer Salvage Its Image":

It is has been a very bad week for those claiming Israel has the most moral army in the world. Here’s a small sample of abuses of Palestinians in recent days in which the Israeli army was caught lying.

A child horrifically injured by soldiers was arrested and terrified into signing a false confession that he was hurt in a bicycle accident. A man who, it was claimed, had died of tear-gas inhalation was actually shot at point-blank range, then savagely beaten by a mob of soldiers and left to die. And soldiers threw a tear gas canister at a Palestinian couple, baby in arms, as they fled for safety during a military invasion of their village.

In the early 2000s, at the dawn of the social media revolution, Israelis used to dismiss filmed evidence of brutality by their soldiers as fakery. It was what they called “Pallywood” – a conflation of Palestinian and Hollywood.

In truth, however, it was the Israeli military, not the Palestinians, that needed to manufacture a more convenient version of reality.

Last week, it emerged, Israeli officials had conceded to a military court that the army had beaten and locked up a group of Palestinian reporters as part of an explicit policy of stopping journalists from covering abuses by its soldiers.

Israel’s deceptions have a long history. Back in the 1970s, a young Juliano Meir-Khamis, later to become one of Israel’s most celebrated actors, was assigned the job of carrying a weapons bag on operations in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. When Palestinian women or children were killed, he placed a weapon next to the body.

In one incident, when soldiers playing around with a shoulder-launcher fired a missile at a donkey, and the 12-year-old girl riding it, Meir-Khamis was ordered to put explosives on their remains.

That occurred before the Palestinians’ first mass uprising against the occupation erupted in the late 1980s. Then, the defence minister Yitzhak Rabin – later given a Hollywood-style makeover himself as a peacemaker – urged troops to “break the bones” of Palestinians to stop their liberation struggle.
The desperate, and sometimes self-sabotaging, lengths Israel takes to try to salvage its image were underscored last week when 15-year-old Mohammed Tamimi was grabbed from his bed in a night raid.

Back in December he was shot in the face by soldiers during an invasion of his village of Nabi Saleh. Doctors saved his life, but he was left with a misshapen head and a section of skull missing.

Mohammed’s suffering made headlines because he was a bit-player in a larger drama. Shortly after he was shot, a video recorded his cousin, 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi, slapping a soldier nearby after he entered her home.

Ahed, who is in jail awaiting trial, was already a Palestinian resistance icon. Now she has become a symbol too of Israel’s victimisation of children.

So, Israel began work on recrafting the narrative: of Ahed as a terrorist and provocateur.

It emerged that a government minister, Michael Oren, had even set up a secret committee to try to prove that Ahed and her family were really paid actors, not Palestinians, there to “make Israel look bad”. The Pallywood delusion had gone into overdrive.

Last week events took a new turn as Mohammed and other relatives were seized, even though he is still gravely ill. Dragged off to an interrogation cell, he was denied access to a lawyer or parent.
Shortly afterwards, Israel produced a signed confession stating that Mohammed’s horrific injuries were not Israel’s responsibility but wounds inflicted in a bicycle crash.

Yoav Mordechai, the occupation’s top official, trumpeted proof of a Palestinian “culture of lies and incitement”. Mohammed’s injuries were “fake news”, the Israeli media dutifully reported.

Deprived of a justification for slapping an occupation soldier, Ahed can now be locked away by military judges. Except that witnesses, phone records and hospital documentation, including brain scans, all prove that Mohammed was shot.

This was simply another of Israellywood’s endless productions to automatically confer guilt on Palestinians. The hundreds of children on Israel’s incarceration production line each year have to sign confessions – or plea bargains – to win jail-sentence reductions from courts with near-100% conviction rates.

It is more Franz Kafka than Hollywood.

A second army narrative unravelled last week. CCTV showed Yasin Saradih, 35, being shot at point-blank range during an invasion of Jericho, then savagely beaten by soldiers as he lay wounded, and left to bleed to death.

It was an unexceptional incident. A report by Amnesty International last month noted that many of the dozens of Palestinians killed in 2017 appeared to be victims of extra-judicial executions.

Before footage of Saradih’s killing surfaced, the army issued a series of false statements, including that he died from tear-gas inhalation, received first-aid treatment and was armed with a knife. The video disproves all of that.

Over the past two years, dozens of Palestinians, including women and children, have been shot in similarly suspicious circumstances. Invariably the army concludes that they were killed while attacking soldiers with a knife – Israel even named this period of unrest a “knife intifada”.

Are soldiers today carrying a “knife bag”, just as Meir-Khamis once carried a weapons bag?

A half-century of occupation has not only corrupted generations of teenage Israeli soldiers who have been allowed to lord it over Palestinians. It has also needed an industry of lies and self-deceptions to make sure the consciences of Israelis are never clouded by a moment of doubt – that maybe their army is not so moral after all.

The Last Rampage vs Reversal of Fortune

I watched a horribly violent true crime movie, The Last Rampage, the story of murderer Gary Tison's escape from an Arizona prison in the late '70's.

Partway through, the story started sounding familiar. It was the case lawyer Alan Dershowitz was working on when he went to work for Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune.

In Reversal of Fortune, we see Dershowitz shouting into a phone trying to save two innocent young boys from execution. One of Dershowitz's sons explains that "two kids" helped their father escape from prison and had been sentenced to death because their father committed a couple of murders while on the run. Such injustice!

I'm against the death penalty in any case, but The Last Rampage paints a very different picture of the case. There were three sons who helped their father escape from prison. He was kept in a minimum security wing of the prison, God knows why. He was a convicted murderer. He and his cell mate who escaped with them were both monsters. The prison allowed visitors to have little picnics with the inmate they were visiting, so the three sons came in with a basket loaded with guns---revolvers and sawed-off shotguns. They held the guards and other visitors at gunpoint and made their escape.

The three sons stayed with their father as he and his cellmate headed for Mexico. When their car broke down, two of the sons stood by the car on the side of the road. A man and his family stopped to help them and rest of the gang appeared from the behind the brush with guns. They robbed the family, put them in the car and drove them to another spot and murdered them. The sons played an active role in the robbery and kidnapping, but didn't actually shoot the victims who included a 15-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy.

From there, they went on to murder a couple on their honeymoon and Tison plotted to murder his brother.

The way Tison was presented in the movie, it's impossible to imagine that the sons didn't know how dangerous he was. They visited him in prison every Sunday. Their mother was out of her mind, insisting he was completely innocent.

I saw Dershowitz long ago on a daytime talk show. He shouted down members of one of the victim's family. "STOP HIDING BEHIND YOUR VICTIMIZATION," Dershowitz screeched. Ironic coming from a Zionist. And anyway, going on TV to talk about their family being murdered is not hiding behind their victimization.

Dershowitz is a typical Zionist only more so, sort of liberal in the United States but a violent racist when it comes to Palestinians. The actor who played him in Reversal of Fortune, Ron Silver, was a stereotypical neo-con, a liberal who turned right-wing because it would better serve Israel. He became a Bush supporter, supported the invasion of Iraq, and co-founded a group called One Jerusalem established to oppose the Oslo Peace Accords and maintain Jewish control over Jerusalem. Silver died years ago, but he would have loved Trump.

"One Jerusalem" held a rally. CNN said thousands attended. The Israeli press claimed 100,000 and "One Jerusalem" itself claimed 400,000, an absurd number---it would be half the population of Jersualem which is only 64% Jewish.

The Last Rampage is available for instant viewing on Netflix.

Once-accused rapist Kobe Bryant wins Oscar

Wasn't Kobe Bryant accused of rape several years ago? The charges were dropped when the accuser refused to testify. He just won an Oscar for an animated short. Maybe this #MeToo thing is winding down.

It could also be that celebrities defended Roman Polanski because they were too dumb to remember what he pleaded guilty to, they now attack Woody Allen because they're too dumb to remember that the accusations against him were proven false 25 years ago, and now they're too dumb to remember Kobe Bryant's past.

I turned on the Oscars. It was embarrassing to watch and I got bored after two minutes. I realized that anything interesting would be on YouTube in the morning so I turned it off.

Mia and Ronan Farrow and Woody Allen in Psychology Today

From an article in Psychology Today by Joan Ullman who covered the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow custody hearing in 1992. She writes about the trial and what has happened since then, how she sided with Mia Farrow at the time but started having doubts about her.

Read the whole thing here:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/uncharted-customs/201801/ronan-farrow-man-mission

...During the trial, which I wrote about for Psychology Today, Mia charged Woody with going from obsessive focusing on Dylan to one day, when alone with her, sexually abusing her. Mia subsequently made a tape of Dylan reciting what had allegedly occurred. But Dylan initially told contradictory stories, and the tape had many stops and starts. After extensive investigation, authorities concluded that Dylan was either suffering from stress or had been coached by her mother, or some combination of the two. And Woody, who’d passed a lie detector test, was never arrested or charged with any crime.

But trial testimony revealed that Mia and Woody’s problems long predated their legal wrangling. They began when Mia talked a reluctant Woody into having a baby with her—promising him he’d need bear no responsibility for its upbringing.

After no baby was forthcoming, the pair adopted Dylan. Woody was instantly smitten. From a non-fixture in Mia’s large, multi-cultural household (7 adopted, ailing children from around the world, 4 biological)—which Woody viewed as an atypical assemblage but not a genuine family—he became an obsessive, doting presence.

Then, after five years of trying, Mia became pregnant, an event that I, like many in the outside world, greeted with jubilation. But Satchel/Ronan’s arrival only made matters worse. The more time Mia spent alone, breastfeeding Ronan, the more Woody hovered over Dylan, fretting that she was being ignored—and the more some observers grew creeped out by what they deemed Woody’s excessive fondling and fussing over Dylan.

During the trial, sides for both Mia and Woody came to describe the baby Ronan’s reaction to his father as `phobic'. Whenever Woody held Ronan, the infant screamed, squirmed, and kicked at him until he was returned to his mother. Out of his arms, Woody ignored Ronan, but at times, when holding him, yanked at him hurtfully. Despite many attempts at bettering it, the father-son relationship seemed to be one of mutual hate at first sight.

These fraught relationships landed Ronan and Dylan in therapy when they were 2 and 4 1/2 respectively.

Trial testimony focused on Woody’s parenting shortcomings with both Dylan and Ronan. It ended in a total victory for Mia. Woody's behavior with Dylan was deemed `grossly inappropriate,' he was granted only limited, supervised visiting rights with his children, and soon even these came to an end. The judge also faulted Woody for failing to see that bonds between adopted children are as valid as those between biological siblings, and for failing to grasp how upset Mia’s children were by Woody’s affair with Soon-Yi. The judge also found that Woody, the long-time therapy maven- who had made therapy-going cool for me and my generation of Woody Allen fans - lacked 'judgement, insight, and impulse control.’

During the trial, I’d counted myself in the Mia Camp. I couldn’t condone or understand Woody’s inability to fathom why his choice of Soon-Yi- stirred such moral revulsion: As he told Timemagazine, “I (was) not Soon-Yi’s father or stepfather… She’s Mia’s daughter. But she’s an adopted daughter and a grown woman. I could have met her at a party or something.”

I’d also admired Mia for welcoming such a large, disparate brood of needy children into what sounded to be a warm, nurturing environment. Years later, when I wrote another piece about the story, I had second thoughts. This time I focused on Mia’s largely unreported behavior after 1992, well before the trial, when she’d found nude pictures of Soon-Yi in Woody’s apartment and learned of their affair. Mia didn’t just fly between fits of rage, tears, and physical fights with Woody and Soon-Yi which alternated between bouts of attempted reconciliation--behaviors I’d have found totally understandable. Amazingly, Mia, still under contract, managed to keep showing up appearing totally unflustered and right on schedule, to complete her work in Woody’s film,Husbands and Wives. No one outside the family had any hint of the turmoil at home. To Woody’s surprise, even after publicly labeling him a child molester, Mia still planned to keep working in his next film, Manhattan Murder Mystery (He replaced her with Diane Keaton).

Twenty years ago, many trial reporters had thought Mia crazy because of her 'adoption mania’. At the time I'd never realized that before, during, and just after the trial, Mia had succumbed to what now looked to me like a fit of total adoption lunacy. During this period, she’d gone racing out and gobbling up five more afflicted children from Third World countries: Tam a blind 13-year-old girl from Vietnam who also suffered from a heart ailment; Isaiah, a crack addicted African American boy, Thaddeus, an Indian boy, paralyzed with polio from his waist down; Quincy, a girl, who initially couldn’t move her arms; and Frankie-Minh, another blind Vietnamese girl.

Surely Mia could not have been running the healing, safe-haven type home I’d envisioned. Just caring for these seriously incapacitated newcomer children alone would have posed enormous challenges for anyone. But during this time, Mia was also busy tending to her already large and troubled brood, and regularly attending the trial when it met, in addition to still struggling with her hurt and rage at Woody and Soon-Yi. It struck me that by trying to affix this many afflicted children at once into her fraught household, Mia might have been at least as lacking as Woody in `judgement, insight, and impulse control.’

...

In his decision, Judge Wilk had stated his belief that after time away from their father, when recovered from the damaging impact of the Woody-Soon-Yi affair, and aided by their mother and continued therapy, Dylan, Ronan, and Moses would eventually be able to reconnect and form meaningful relationships with Woody.

The judge never learned how badly awry his hopes had gone, and never anticipated that Mia would raise the children marinating in bitterness. Nor did he ever read how Woody’s recently reconciled son, Moses Previn, now a family therapist, described his upbringing: “My mother drummed it into me to hate my father for tearing apart the family and sexually molesting my sister…. I see now this was a vengeful way to pay him back for falling in love with Soon-Yi.”

Ronan Farrow

Indeed, by the mid-2000s, Ronan Farrow, who’d grown up in a family given to privately chanting `Woody no Goody,’ was publicly drawing attention to himself—and to his Woody-created, atypical family, like some sort of modern day Sphinx, in a series of oracular, sardonic tweets:

`He’s my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression,’ Ronan tweeted in 2011

`Happy Father’s Day—or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law’s day,’ he memorably tweeted on Father’s Day, June 12, 2012.

...

The next year, Mia made news in a 2013 Vanity Fair article, suggesting that Ronan was “possibly” the son of her first ex-husband, Frank Sinatra.

...

Although Sinatra’s widow, Barbara, and his daughter, Nancy Sinatra Jr. quickly labeled Mia’s suggestion `nonsense,’ Ronan’s big blue eyes and fair coloring have kept the rumor alive—notwithstanding that he also looks just like Mia and members of her own family.

Three months later, in January, 2014, when Woody received a Golden Globes Lifetime Achievement Award, Ronan took to Twitter again—just in time to try to dampen the enthusiasm for Woody’s celebration: `Missed the Woody Allen tribute—did they put in the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?

The next month, in a New York Times article, Ronan’s now-28-year-old married sister Dylan not only dredged up the old discredited custody trial molestation charges for a whole new generation who knew nothing of their history, she also called out Hollywood movie stars for continuing to work with him. The article’s timing cast doubt on Cate Blanchett’s likely win for her role in Woody’s 2014 Blue Jasmine. It also threatened to dampen enthusiasm for the opening of Woody Allen's first Broadway show, Bullets Over Broadway.

Woody countered with his own op-ed in The Times, again proclaiming his innocence. He later cautioned lest our zeal to root out sexual harassment become a witch hunt. Since then, he’s typically remained silent. But the new attacks, and Ronan’s continuing tweets, have left his father’s name besmirched as it never was before.

And while there’s no comparison, Woody is now grouped, and even pictured, with Harvey Weinstein and other `monstrous’ men. And viewers now debate whether they should continue to see and enjoy Woody’s films or ban them forever, as they’re doing with the works of other alleged harassers.

Meanwhile his son Ronan is on a roll, and who knows when or if it will stop. Perhaps when one of the many `skits and songs’ which Mia boasts that Ronan has written find a producer, thus rivaling or outdoing another of his father’s multiple creative accomplishments?

At a recent lunch for journalists, Ronan reportedly admitted that lest the #Me Too movement swings too far, we should `absolutely’ recognize the `risk’ of innocent men becoming `casualties’ of false sex harassment charges. But he believes this movement of `white hot anguish’ is a net benefit to society. Ronan added that growing up with his sister accusing their father of sexually abusing her gave him an understanding of `some but not all’ of what Weinstein’s accusers went through.

But did it?

I don’t begrudge the parade of #Me Too women who have, partly thanks to Ronan, found their voices. I only wish our new sexual harassment czar hadn’t grown up steeped in such hatred of his famous father. Whenever I see Ronan, I can’t help think, he’s brilliant like his father, but without any of the angst or charm that made Woody so endearing to me and to so many others for so many years. In today’s hysteria -tinged atmosphere, having such a relentless avenger of sexual indignities can’t in the long run be all that healthy. At least, I wish we had a crusader with a more balanced perspective, not someone born to his job, who’s been on a life-long mission impossible to root out all semblance of human imperfection which tragically, he’s found embodied in the hated image of his father.