Andre Previn

He does not exist.

Andre Previn has died at 89.

He dumped his first wife, singer Betty Bennett, while she was pregnant, shortly before she gave birth. He dumped his next wife, Dory Previn, while she was hospitalized with a mental breakdown he caused when he knocked up Mia Farrow. He married Farrow. Didn't they break up because he was sleeping another woman? Then he married Heather Sneddon who he dumped after seventeen years. He married Anne-Sophie Mutter and they got divorced after four years.

In spite of all that, he said about his adopted daughter, Soon-yi Previn, "She does not exist," because she didn't live up to his high standards.

What an asshole.

Woody Allen's French distributor, Rainy Day in New York

Roger Friedman of Showbiz411 is reporting that Woody Allen's French distributor MARS is trying to make a deal to distribute Rainy Day In New York.

The movie, starring Timothee Chalamet, Jude Law, Rebecca Hall, and Elle Fanning among others, has been sidelined by Allen’s problems with Amazon. Ready for release, “Rainy Day” got caught in the #MeToo movement– inaccurately. The result was Amazon deciding unilaterally not to release the newest film by one of our greatest auteurs. 

The article goes on to quote Stephane Célérier who runs MARS. Célérier wrote an essay in a French magazine defending Allen:

 He wrote: “I have been shocked by the wave of hate provoked by the Woody Allen affair, particularly in the United States and on the social networks, and by the lack of rigor by certain media outlets and the pack which condemns without looking into the full facts.”

Célérier said it was time “to examine the facts with attention…That is the approach I have decided to take. Simply to get to the bottom of the truth, to understand whether I’ve been working closely with a paedophile all these years.”

“He has always in my eyes been a man of incredible intelligence as well as discreet and courteous. But his talent and his effervescent creativity don’t make a saint. The admiration I have for the man and the cineaste is real but have not influenced the steps I have taken to ask questions.”

“It seems clear to me that Woody Allen should not be classified in the same category as the sexual predators recently denounced by Hollywood and end his days as a pariah whose work should be burned,” he wrote.

“But it seems complicated today, impossible even, to stand-up for Woody Allen’s innocence without prompting violent reactions and accusations that I am sacrificing the rights of women for economic gain.”   

Friedman adds:

We can debate the whole Woody-Mia saga forever. But the facts are, Woody was cleared of everything. Nothing happened. Mia Farrow has waged a PR war with him since 1992. Then her son with Woody, Ronan Farrow, who was 5 years old at the time, picked up the baton. He has been hypnotized by his mother into believing everything she says. He probably thinks Frank Sinatra is his father.

...

One last thing: every single #MeToo perpetrator has been accused by multiple victims. The only case to ever follow Woody is just this one, which was alleged during a custody battle. That’s it. And meanwhile, Mia Farrow’s brother, John, continues to serve time in a Maryland prison, convicted of actual child molestation. Mia has never addressed that subject.

Lately, Ronan's argument against Allen has been that there was no evidence against Harvey Weinstein, either. That's now his standard of proof.

Soon-yi Previn and Moses Farrow have spoken and written about the abuse they suffered at the hands of Mia Farrow long before Ronan Farrow was even born. He knows absolutely nothing about it, but he still feels free to attack them for it.

I don't know how much of this is backfiring on Mia Farrow. She and her favorite white children haven't slowed Woody Allen down. There was a momentary pause in his career before the deal to make a movie in Spain this summer, but it's getting far more publicity for than he would have gotten otherwise.

Mia's convicted pedophile brother has come up so often, why hasn't she said anything about it? She wasn't estranged from him. He visited her and her children. Was he ever alone with them? Most of them weren't related to him by birth. Has Mia shown any concern about that?

We already knew she was a homewrecker. Now she's been exposed as a child abuser.

We had snow

I'm glad the kids got a snow day and I'm fine with getting a day off work. But I had to shovel a walk to get my 87-year-old mother to the car. Our electricity was out and I didn't want to have her stay in a dark freezing house. We went to a motel. The drive over there was fine. The road was clear. But the parking lot was under more than a foot of snow. The car got stuck while I was trying to park. I borrowed a shovel and cleared out a parking space.

Spent the night. For the very first time, I watched an episode of Murder She Wrote to the conclusion. John Saxon was the victim. But it ended with Jessica confronting the killer. He doesn't confess, so she tells him that as soon as the DNA test results come back, they'll know it was him.

So why not just wait for the DNA test?

If I were a suspect in some crime and some stinking detective, real or amateur, tried to bully a confession out of me, I would be annoyed if it turned out to be completely unnecessary because DNA would solve the whole thing.

The next morning, I drove home. I opened the door. The lights and TV were on. I don't know when the power came back on but the furnace was going and the house was warm.

I drove back to the motel and we checked out.

Male-only draft ruled unconstituional

I remember back in high school. Jimmy Carter had just started draft registration. People today don't seem to realize how right-wing Carter was. We were talking about this in class and some pissed off chick was mad that we didn't want to be drafted. If you're anti-war, you can be medic, she said.

Of course, women can be medics, too. Was she planning to enlist?

I was at work once time and two women co-workers were mad that Bill Clinton hadn't been in the Army like their husbands were. I pointed out to them that there are women in the military. If they had been in Vietnam, they wouldn't even have been combat. They wouldn't have somewhat safe.

So, anyway, a judge in Texas just ruled that drafting men only was unconstitutional. We'll see how it goes.

Former CIA agent Gloria Steinem thought that the reason they didn't have women in combat was that men wouldn't able to dominate women who had killed men in war. And I mentioned elsewhere on this blog that there was a foreign student in my high school who fought in Bangladesh. The teacher asked him to do a presentation about his country and he brought in some slides he took during the war and traumatized the class. If that kid wanted to act up, I don't what the teachers would have done about it.

I heard that this was what happened in colleges after World War Two. A lot of grizzled war veterans got on the GI Bill and wreaked havoc.

Shape of Water vs Beverly Hillbillies

Ew.

 
I couldn't think of the name of the movie. I googled "sex movie about fish man" and it came up, The Shape of Water.

I wonder if I can stream it for free.

I want to make it a double feature with an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, "Don't Marry a Frogman" (season 9, episode 5). Elly May was dating a Navy frogman. Granny had only seen him in his wetsuit and thought he was literally a frog-man.

Michael Jackson's estate suing HBO

 Michael Jackson's estate is suing HBO over its documentary, Leaving Neverland. 

It seems that, in 1992, HBO signed a contract with Jackson's old touring company to broadcast one of his concerts. The contract contained a non-disparagement clause. Because the contract was with the touring company, there are doubts as to whether the Jackson estate has standing to sue, and how do they figure how much damages would be?

Woody Allen to film in San Sebastián

The newspaper El País reported that they've scouted locations in the Basque city of San Sebastián.

According to Variety:

The meeting with Basque authorities looks like a traditional costing exercise. Mediapro and Letty Aronson, the director’s longterm producer and sister, proved adept on both “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and “Midnight in Paris” is tapping into local incentives or tax rebates which allowed shoots to go ahead.

Don't you wish you could film there? You probably could. What does it cost to fly there? Take a camcorder and a couple of actors maybe. I don't know. Don't make a spectacle of yourself and they'll assume you're just a jerk ruining your friends' vacation by annoying them with a camcorder.

Do it this summer and you might catch a glimpse of Woody Allen. Get him in the background of a shot and he'll sue you.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Tilda Swinton and the three actors who played her son at different ages.

Woman has a horrible son. He's wears a diaper until he's 8 or 9. He's not incontinent. He's just a jerk. Most of the movie is in flashback so we know he's committed some monstrous act that's made his mother, now living alone, an outcast and target of abuse.

After school shootings, there's usually some sympathy for the screwed up kids who commit the crime. It was clearly misplaced in the case of Columbine High School. We had one here who was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Most seem vaguely pitiful, but no more than grown-up mass murderers.

It was a grim, serious movie, so I shouldn't mention it, but there's a scene where the kid is preparing to carry out his crime. He's bought a number of kryptonite bike locks. His father (John C Reilly) asks what he needs them for. He's going to re-sell them at school and make a fortune. His father quips that he's another Donald Trump.

Tilda Swinton as his mother. Ezra Miller as teenage Kevin.

Woody Allen back in action

Woody Allen will be shooting a film in the Basque region of Spain this summer. They're expecting to shoot for 7 weeks. No word on who will star.

I'll tell you a very interesting but unrelated fact about the Spanish movie industry. I read this somewhere. Maybe they were talking about TV. But writers there don't get paid.

I quoted someone on here before about this, that nothing's really changed for Allen in 25 years. The people who've been going to his movies will continue. A few snotty movie stars might shun him but there are plenty more fish in the sea.

Nothing can stop him. If fewer people go to his movies, he'll just work a little cheaper.

Somewhere in Basque country.

Stanley Donen, RIP

Stanley Donen has died at age 94.

I've never liked musicals and only have a clear memory of a few of his movies, Charade, Two for the Road, Bedazzled and  Blame it on Rio. He also directed the science fiction movie Saturn 3. I think I tuned into Saturn 3 just long enough to see Kirk Douglas's nude scene. It made me wonder if he had been dying to film nude scenes all those years and he could finally do it, or if he was forcing himself to to stay relevant. Or maybe he was a mature adult who had no strong feeling about it one way or the other.

He had been married five times and is survived by longtime companion Elaine May.

Jussie Smollett

I didn't know who Jussie Smollett was. Still don't really.

There was the case of Morton Downey who falsely claimed to have been attacked by Nazis in a mens room who drew a swastika on his face. But here's a pointer----if you ever draw swastikas on your face, be aware that your image in the mirror will be reversed. He drew the swastikas backward.

Do things like this ever turn out well?

Good luck to him, whoever he is.

Retweet

I wish a @DatelineNBC would open with: "Everybody hated Angela. She was mean and her poetry was terrible. Who wouldn't want her dead?"

--Andy Kindler

Veterans hated John Wayne

People don't seem to know this anymore. For example, in the movie Beavis & Butt-head Do America, their World War Two veteran neighbor idolized John Wayne.

The truth was that most veterans hated Wayne because Wayne stayed out of the war. In his first brush with the draft board, Wayne got out of it by saying he was the sole financial support for his wife and children. He didn't mention he was about to get divorced because he was sleeping with Marlene Dietrich.

His career was just starting to take off with Stagecoach (1939) but he hit it really big when all the other leading men went off to serve in the fight against fascism. Wayne became an A-lister and got rich. He wasn't much different than Sonny Tufts in that regard except that Sonny Tufts was genuinely 4F.

Wayne reportedly made some half-hearted efforts to join. He wrote to someone about joining the OSS, but by the time they wrote back he had already left his wife and she didn't forward the letter to him. Seems like, if he really wanted to join, the obvious thing would be for him to contact them again.

Wayne went on tour with the USO and was booed by the real men---the real teenage men---he was supposed to be entertaining. He KNEW there was a problem.

After the war, he said that he thought he could best serve the war effort by being a wealthy movie star. And he apparently tried to make up for it--or COVER up for it--by becoming a McCarthyite bum after the war.

Now, to be fair, as a politician, celebrity Democrat Al Franken has defended and supported every war he could. Even before he ran for Senate, the first bit of photographic evidence of his sexual abuse of women was from his flight back from visiting the troops in Afghanistan. The only war he ever opposed was the one he might have been asked to fight in. In his book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, be brags about helping his brother lose so much weight that he couldn't be drafted. He was right about Vietnam. He was wrong about the wars he actively supported.

James Dean stayed out of the Korean War by writing to his draft board that he was homosexual.

If, some time after the war, John Wayne had said, "They wouldn't take me! I was gay!" I would have admired him even if it was demonstrably untrue.

Peter Tork RIP

Peter Tork has died at age 77.

"I was born in the 70's so for me, the Monkees came before the Beatles and had no credibility issues. RIP Peter Tork."
--J. Elvis Weinstein

Balloon Boy nine years on

It's been nine years. Balloon Boy must be 15 by now. [I looked it up. He's 16.]

You might recall that a Richard Heene claimed to have accidentally released a large homemade balloon shaped like a flying saucer. He called 9-1-1 and said that his six-year-old son might be in there. They shut down the Denver Airport and had helicopters and police cars chase the balloon for an hour. It finally came down but there was no Balloon Boy. They were afraid he might have fallen to his death.

He was later found hiding in the house.

When the Heene family appeared on CNN via satellite, Wolf Blitzer asked Falcon why he didn't come out when his parents called him. Falcon didn't have an ear piece so his father repeated the question to him.

"You guys said we did it for a show."

Richard Heene had been trying to get a reality TV show about his amateur science stuff. He had already appeared on Wife Swap and acted like a jackass.

Since then, Balloon Boy and his brothers were forced to form a heavy metal band called the Heene Boyz. Not much of a name. Just "Heene" would be a better. Balloon Boy is the cute one. He was made lead vocalist because, his father explained, he had a really high pitched voice.

I watched a couple of their videos. I guess they've given up on science. One celebrated the election of climate change denier Donald Trump even though their mother is a resident alien with a criminal record. Another song denied that the balloon incident was a hoax. Their father says he was forced to plead guilty, pay a huge fine and spend several months in jail to avoid his wife being deported. Their mother confessed because she didn't know what "hoax" meant.

I saw a video of the family on a talk show claiming that they were living off the boys' income from their band, which I suppose is possible. But careers in popular music rarely last very long. Their last video was posted two years ago. My guess is that they're washed up.

And even if they had gotten a reality show, how long could that have lasted? It would have been over in a year or two.

Heene is still trying to strike it rich marketing his inventions. One was a back scratcher---just a wooden stick you install in your house to rub your back on. That was $20. Another was a device for shaking bottles of condiments. It sold for six payments of $29.99 each. $180 to spare you the inconvenience of shaking your condiments.

I don't know if there's much more they can do on their quest for fame. The only thing left that I can think of would be for them to come clean, hire a ghostwriter and reveal the full story behind the hoax.

By the way, the penalty for manslaughter in Colorado is 2 to 6 years in prison so, even if anyone had been killed chasing the balloon, Heene would be free by now.

It's a sad story of disappointment and failure. Heene thought a reality show would be his salvation. He gave it his all. He'd do anything for self-promotion, but he was terrible at it.

16mm Canon Scoopic

There are surprisingly affordable 16mm cameras available. There's a Canon Scoopic on ebay for $150. It's a 16mm camera apparently intended for newsreel work. It's like a big Super 8 camera with reflex viewfinder, a built-in zoom lens and automatic exposure.

And others. Lots of others.

Take a look at the cost of short ends, unused film left over from movie shoots that you can get relatively cheap. I don't know, but film cost may not be quite as terrible as I let on earlier.

Spielberg lashes out

I had a friend whose elderly aunt and uncle sat right behind Steven Spielberg at a special screening of a movie in New York.

"I could have hit him over the head and killed him!" his uncle said.

Spielberg might be well-advised to opt for home video. 

I really don't believe the guy goes to movies. But Spielberg is attacking streaming video. He considers movies shown on streaming services to be made-for-TV movies, not REAL movies, although he's also said that his movie, Lincoln, almost didn't get a theatrical release. 

“I hope all of us really continue to believe that the greatest contributions we can make as filmmakers is to give audiences the motion picture theatrical experience,” the directing legend said on Saturday night while accepting the Filmmaker Award at the Cinema Audio Society’s CAS Awards at the InterContinental Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. “I’m a firm believer that movie theaters need to be around forever.”

What he really means is that crap like The Transformers and Jurassic Park should be around forever. It's small and medium films don't go to theaters anymore.

Spielberg just isn't very good. Compare him to other directors who emerged at the same time like Coppola and Scorsese. They make a monkey of that guy. There was a time when Spielberg's friends had to tell him to stop making children's movies. He can't film a love scene, he can't film relationships between men and women and he can't make movies about women. 

His movies don't hold up. When they come out, they're talked about like they put every other movie in the genre to shame. After Saving Private Ryan, there were people talking about scrapping every other war movie ever made (even the ones he stole from). Schindler's List was presented as the ultimate Holocaust movie.  I don't think either one is terribly well-regarded anymore.

To me the advantage to seeing a movie theatrically is that you're stuck there. I don't walk out on movies, but I'll turn on something on streaming video, decide it's not for me and turn it off. I don't know how bad a habit this is. Even watching a DVD or broadcast TV requires greater commitment.

The advantage of streaming video over video rentals is that you'll click on movies that you would never rent.

Lonesome Cowboys (1968)

I finally watched Andy Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys. I was surprised to see it posted on YouTube. The sex scenes were artless and unerotic, which is pretty much how I picture sex in the Old West.

Made for $3,000 in 1968 ($22,000 in today's money). They didn't keep the camera clean and you can see lint along the edge of the frame in places.

The truth is, I turned it off halfway through and I kept falling asleep through the half I watched.

A little better than I expected. It was filmed on what looked like a western set. They rode horses. In Luc Moullet's A Girl is a Gun, the actors walked their horses which seemed wise. Riding a horse is dangerous.

It was a great title, but I think that once they had the title, they figured their work was done.

Lonesome Cowboys could only be taken seriously because it was shot on film. One of Andy Warhol's earlier cinematic achievements was filming the Empire State Building for several hours on 16mm film. A few people on YouTube have duplicated this feat with a video camera, but it just isn't the same. It's not art unless you've squandered a fortune on film.

It makes me think of an episode of The Rockford Files. Angel mentions that he used Campbell's Soup cans and a photocopier and "made my own Andy Warhols."

Well, anyone with a camcorder and a few degenerate friends can make his own Andy Warhol movie.

But, again, it just wouldn't be the same.

Bell & Howell 70DR

With the optional hand crank.

Hmm...a Bell & Howell 70DR. Long ago, when I looked at Lenny Lipton's Independent Filmmaking, I read about various 16mm movie cameras. I wanted a Bell & Howell 70DR. It appealed to me more than a Bolex. More rugged, and when you wound them up, they ran longer.Manos: The Hands of Fate was filmed on a couple of these babies.

I looked it up on YouTube. I saw someone's Bell & Howell 70 DR camera test. The picture looked beautiful. You forget how much better film looks than video. But the camera had a registration problem and the picture wasn't steady. So I was torn. Should I desperately want a 16mm camera or not? Because I'd buy one on eBay and I wouldn't know what the registration was like until it was too late.

Then I looked at film. You can buy a used camera for the price of one roll of film.

So forget that.

Anthony Weiner out of prison

If you wanted to write to Anthony Weiner in prison, you're too late. His final release date was May 14th, but he's been transferred to a "Residential Re-entry Management facility" in Brooklyn.

There were claims at the time that the teenager he molested online was a Republican operative or a Russian spy. They seem to have dropped that nonsense.

So, what's next for Weiner? He's a registered sex offender. He has a degree in Political Science which won't do him any good. He's unelectable. He could flee to Israel but I don't know what he'd do there. I thought he could write how-to books on sexting or adapting to minimum security prison. He's been in a couple of movies---Sharknado 3 (along with fellow Zionist Jared Fogle) and a documentary, Weiner. They'd have to pay him, but low budget filmmakers might keep him in mind.

Poor fool.

Jean-Pierre Leaud, La Tour, prends gard!

I watched Jean-Pierre Leaud's first movie, La Tour, prends gard! It was on YouTube, in French without subtitles. I didn't understand a word. It was set in the 1700's. The plot involved traveling performers who become involved in some political conflict. There are sword fights and at least one flogging. Jean-Pierre was cute in a small role.

There are things I don't understand about Leaud. He said that Truffaut was like his father and Godard like his uncle. How did his real father feel about this?

His mother got him the audition for The 400 Blows. She was an actress, his father a screenwriter. For some reason, they put him in boarding school. When he was cast in the movie, the principal wrote Truffaut a letter essentially warning him that Jean-Pierre was a brat, and, when they were out on location one day, the kid went into a store and was caught shoplifting.

Leaud was later expelled from boarding school. The retired couple he was living with kicked him out and Truffaut took him in. So where were his parents? They let their troubled teenage son move into a studio apartment rented by a bachelor in the same building he lived in. This was after Truffaut had 14-year-old Jean-Pierre do a brief butt shot in The 400 Blows.

But it all worked out very well for the young fellow. His life was transformed. He became an icon in world cinema.

It's not the same as leaving your children with Michael Jackson before there were rumors about him, but you might think about it before judging the parents of Jackson's victims too harshly.

Is Bryan Singer through?

Bryan Singer may be kaput. There was a long article in The Atlantic about the sexual abuse and rape allegations against him involving teenage boys. Since then, the movie Red Sonja that he was set to direct has been shelved, GLAAD disqualified Bohemian Rhapsody from it's annual Media Awards and BAFTA suspended Singers's nomination in the Outstanding British Film catagory. The movie itself and people associated with it are still in the running.

The first I heard of the guy was the scandal around the movie Apt Pupil (1998). Kids who showed up as extras in a locker room scene thinking they would be wearing speedos or towels were ordered to appear nude. According to the Atlantic article, Singer molested a 13-year-old extra in a separate section of the locker room.

In the case of Red Sonja, as I understand it, there are doubts about distribution in the United States which it needs to get distribution deals outside the United States.

When he was hired to direct Bohemian Rhapsody, Singer had to be told to show up every day to not break any laws. Doesn't seem like much to ask, but they had to fire him anyway. According to Hollywood Reporter:

There was great tension on the set, caused in part by Singer's tardiness and absences. Malek, taking his seat in the makeup chair at 6:30 a.m., would find himself and other cast and crew waiting around for a director whose work ethic fell short. Tom Hollander, who plays Queen manager Jim Beach, was said to be so upset with Singer that he quit the project briefly.

Tensions escalated into an on-set altercation between Singer and his star (by all accounts, one of the nicest actors in the business). With reports of a piece of electrical equipment thrown by Singer (though not at anyone), a complaint — apparently from Malek — prompted Fox to dispatch several execs to London. Singer's conduct was deemed not actionable. With principal photography about two-thirds done as the holidays approached, the studio hoped to power through. Singer now tells THR in a statement that, "Any discussion about fights between myself and Rami Malek are simply an exaggeration of a few creative differences that were quickly resolved. This is normal on a film set. And I think the work speaks for itself."

Around Thanksgiving, Singer declared that he needed to return home — for several weeks. He asked the studio to pause the production. Snider admonished him not to get on a plane; he left anyway. "He said he was exhausted and something got thrown in that his mom was not well," says a source involved.

Singer flew to Los Angeles; his mother was in New Jersey.

Amazing the problems they have with someone paid so much.

An unnamed executive is quoted in the article:

"There are artists we work with who are complex and raw in their behavior. Do we tolerate any of that kind of behavior going forward? I don't think Bryan is an interesting debate anymore. There are a bunch of other people who are."

He's directed some successful movies, but I doubt it was his directing that did the trick. Bryan Singer's not an auteur. He's a director, not a filmmaker. Without a huge budget, there's not much there. If they won't trust him with tens of millions of dollars, he's finished.

Happy Valentine's Day!

See how happy they are.

Is this Valentine's Day? I guess I should write something about romantic movies, but I generally find romantic comedies horrifying---they're basically about stalking. The first one I saw was Picture Perfect which I got dragged off to. Jennifer Aniston will lose her job because she's not married, so she tells her boss she's engaged. She has a photo taken at a recent wedding where she's with some guy she doesn't know so she claims he's her fiance. Her boss demands to meet him so she pays the guy to come to town and pretend to be her betrothed but then he refuses to leave her apartment and demands she marry him.

We went out after the movie. I thought it should have been a thriller or a horror movie, but the women thought it was hilarious.

There was a radio psychiatrist I used to listen to. He got a call from a middle aged man who wanted to get married and have children, but he was middle aged and he didn't have much time, so he bought an engagement ring. He went into a store. He told the cashier he was old and didn't have much time but wanted to get married. He demanded she marry him and refused to leave. He couldn't understand why they threatened to call police. The manager finally said she would talk to him about it outside. He stepped out and the manager locked the door.

If that had been a romantic comedy, he would have kept coming back.

There was a documentary called Crazy Love. Twenty-one-year-old Linda Riss started dating New York lawyer Burt Pugach in the 1950's. He was an ambulance chaser, more insurance adjuster than lawyer. Riss learned he was married and broke up with him. He started stalking and threatening her. She kept calling the police but they did nothing. They were afraid if him because he was a lawyer. Finally, Pugach hired a man to go to her apartment and knock on the door. She opened the door and he threw acid in her face. She was blinded.

Police arrested Pugach, beat him up, and he wound up in Attica. Being a lawyer, he made a lot of money from the other inmates and he would send letters and checks to Riss.

After fourteen years in prison he was up for parole. Riss told the parole board that he was still harassing her. He kept sending her letters and checks. The parole board was impressed by this and released him. He was now free to stalk her. She finally agreed to meet with him. Her life after being blinded hadn't been good. She horrified her friends and family when she started dating him. They got married.

Pugach was arrested later for threatening to throw acid in the face of another woman he was sleeping with. But his wife stood by him, the simp.

So maybe romantic comedies are more realistic than I thought.

There are straight romances. The director of The Way We Were explained that, in a movie of this type, you show the couple slowly getting together then they're happy for about one minute and they start to drift apart.

Albert Finney who died last week was always shocked that people would tell him how romantic Two for the Road was----it was about a couple in a seriously strained marriage.

Maybe Woody Allen's chances aren't so good

Hollywood Reporter seemed to think that Amazon's chances against Woody Allen are a better than others have reported. Juries may turn against Allen because of the baseless accusation against him.

I don't know whether public ignorance is a good thing or a bad thing. I would imagine that most people know nothing about Mia and Woody and if they do know anything, they'll be excluded from the jury. Amazon won't be able to claim that Woody married his daughter or his step-daughter or his adopted daughter like the outraged ignoramuses online have. In fact, the jury will look over and see Allen's 48-year-old wife sitting with him and wonder what all the fuss is about.

The Hollywood Reporter article ends with this:

Still, one top executive at an Amazon rival sees the case as a potential windfall for Allen if (and that's a big "if") he wins. "He can take the money and make a few movies and have money for P&A. He can hire a booking and marketing company for a fee," says the exec. "Or sell on the open market. Who knows what company might be willing to distribute? Especially since nothing has changed with him in 25 years."

Even without the $68 million, he probably has the money to do it now.

I've always wondered if prominent directors would be willing to go back to filming low budget movies like they did at the start of their careers. Spike Lee's first movie was She's Gotta Have It made for $175,000. And there were guys like John Waters and Jim Jarmusch. Union rules might get in their way although Woody Allen pays actors the union minimum. Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho to see if he could make a low budget ($800 thousand) movie using the crew from his TV show.

I'm sure there are very good reasons why they don't do it, but I've never felt sorry for millionaires who can't get funding for their movies.

I've never understood Allen using such big stars. I can't imagine Leonardo DiCaprio fans flocking to a Woody Allen movie because he was in it. How many Miley Cyrus fans tuned into Crisis in Six Scenes?

There are websites where you can find the names of actors who appear in TV commercials. The two boys playing brothers in an ad for motorcycle insurance had a huge following. That's where Allen should go for his talent. 

Trump will be gone soon enough

When I was in high school, some kid started a betting pool. He took bets on when Reagan would die. A lot of kids were excitedly placing their bets. It seemed clever for the kid who was doing it---he would collect money and never have to pay out. This was right after Reagan was elected and he died in 2004. I assume the kid was never questioned by the Secret Service or the Vice Squad and was never called into the principal's office.

We never got rid of Reagan. The Democrats went out of their way not to impeach him for Iran-Contra. The press helped conceal his senile dementia. After he left office, stories started appearing about how bad he was. One reporter found that he had no memory of a meeting he just stepped out of.

This is why it's so stupid for Democrats to pin their hopes on Trump being impeached. During the debates, Hillary Clinton evaded questions about the content of the emails Wikileaks released. She was beaming as she claimed that Russia did it and Trump was working for them. She couldn't say it with a straight face, but Democrats took it to heart and have never dropped it.

As with Reagan, we're just going to have to sweat it out for four years. It's not THAT long. He hasn't even started a war yet. But if they're not careful he's going to win a second term.

Let this be the end of Shia LaBeouf

It's annoying that Shia LaBeouf has staged a bit of a comeback. For years he would seemingly damage his career by committing some violent crime, then he would retreat into conceptual "art", then go back into acting like nothing had happened. Now he's made a movie with an Israeli director, a pathetic sob story about how terrible it was before he became a wealthy child star.

Most of us have gone through life having never been arrested. Most of us will go to our graves having never attacked anyone with a knife or being in a drunk driving accident. Not counting the actual rapists, he's worse than most of the #MeToo guys.

I finally saw him in Nymphomaniac. There was nothing special there. He was up for Armie Hammer's role in Call Me By Your Name but investors put their foot down. They didn't need him fouling up their movie. And they were right. Look what he during the filming of Peanut Butter Falcon. He was in another movie that only sold one ticket when it was shown in British theaters. They released it on home video at the same time, but you had to pay to see it that way, too.

His career should have ended years ago.

How to get water out of the basement

What I learned this weekend

On Thanksgiving, I didn't have much choice. Everything was closed. I used a shopvac to get water, a few inches deep in places, out of the basement. I barely put a dent in it. It took twenty seconds to fill the thing with water, then I had to lug it upstairs to dump it outside.

Turns out what you need is a submersible pump. I ran out and bought one for just under $60. I attached a garden hose to it and ran it into the yard. Then I placed it in the deepest place in the water and plugged it in. Had most of it out in an hour and a half.

My only power

Edgar Ulmer. I thought nudists were more health conscious. Why is he smoking?

I was watching a movie on a public domain Roku channel. It was an old 1930's B movie I had never seen before. It was fifty-five minutes or an hour long, and it had a scene where people pull up and go into a fancy party at a mansion with two rows of butlers you have to pass through to get inside.

"Is this Edgar Ulmer?" I thought. I backed it up. It was directed by Edgar Ulmer. "I can recognize the work of Edgar Ulmer!" I thought. 

I'm like Clint Eastwood in The Good the Bad and the Ugly. He hears some shooting and says, "Every gun plays its own tune." He could tell it was Eli Wallach murdering someone just from the sound of the gunshots.

You might recall that there the time I was watching The Rifleman and there was a shot though the spokes of a wagon wheel and I thought, "Hey! Did Joseph Lewis direct this?" And I was right! Joseph Lewis was known in the '30's as Wagon Wheel Joe because he kept doing that in his B movies. Filming through a wagon wheel wasn't THAT interesting and it made it difficult to edit.

You know what else I'm like? I'm like The Specter. I told a friend about this old comic book reprinted in Jules Pfeiffer's book The Great Comic Book Heroes. The Specter at one point is able to see through a person's skull and see the patterns in his brain and read his memories.

"What a stupid super power!" my friend said.

"Well, he could do other things," I said.

The ability to guess who directed a 1930's B movie if it was directed by Edgar Ulmer or Joseph Lewis is pretty useless. You can just look at the credits and see who directed, and what good does it do you?

On the other hand, I was talking to a guy who worked at Wendy's. I told him I liked it better when they used Nalley's mustard and they had changed to French's, and he was touched. He didn't think anyone cared about the food he lovingly prepared.

What about William Beaudine? Could I spot William Beaudine's work if I had to? I usually like William Beaudine's B movie directing better than Lewis's or Ulmer's, but Beaudine got no respect. Beaudine's movies tend to have racist jokes in them, though, the bastard.

Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1948)

Based on the novel. It wasn't as obscure as I thought it was.

I just sat through a public domain British boarding school movie about a middle aged teacher who's jealous of the popular new young teacher. I didn't pay close enough attention to know which was Mr Perrin and which was Mr Traill. They get into a physical fight over an umbrella. The younger fellow just out of the Army won that round. He gets engaged to the school nurse the older fellow was secretly in love with. The old teacher confronts the younger one. Perhaps unwisely, they built the school near a cliff overlooking the ocean.

The older guy has a knife he took away from a twelve-year-old. The younger teacher backs up slightly and falls through the railing. He lands unconscious on the beach.

"Ah! Good! The old guy triumphs!" I thought.

But no such luck. The tide is coming in and the younger guy is about to drown so the old guy climbs down the cliff at great personal risk and inconvenience and saves his good-looking rival only to drown in the ocean himself.



A non-incestuous Oedipal fantasy. These are more common than that "hero's journey" nonsense people are still talking about. Stories about a younger man trying to replace an older one usually qualify. Look at Shane or half the episodes of Star Trek where Captain Kirk fights for control of the Enterprise.

Luke Turner cries antisemitism

That's him on the right.

Below is a parody written by Benjamin H. Bratton of the work of Luke Turner, one of the "artists" collaborating with Shia LaBeouf. Turner recognized himself and claims that it's an "unambiguously antisemitic attack" on him. I really don't see it. Judge for yourself:

British artist Mark Booker announced that his ongoing performance piece “to be the most twee, unlikable, self-congratulatory, politically-adolescent Art Brat imaginable” would come to a close. He posted that the work meant to demonstrate “basically the worst aspects of MFA psychosis plus Targeted Individual Syndrome.” Booker’s performance was based on Joaquin Phoenix’s I’m Still Here, in which the actor pretended to make a dramatic career change, have a mental breakdown, and involved unsuspecting entertainment media into the hoax.

For Booker, the initial gesture was to establish a fictitious art collective with Dustin Diamond, the actor who played “Screech” on the’90s TV show, Saved By The Bell, whose own works as independent artist include publicly watching every single episode of the show consecutively and “getting arrested” in Atlanta, Georgia while berating the officers with drunken racist abuse.

Booker and his accomplices utilized art world media channels and social media platforms to coordinate the release of several interconnected works: installations with stereotypical anti-Trump slogans, slapstick parodies of relational aesthetics, dramatic “call outs” of various antagonists to his virtual persona, and a robotic series of tweets about the virtues of “sincerity.” Some of the work was accepted into the Cyprus Triennial, but Booker refused to participate and launched an open-ended protest against the curators. Unbeknownst to Booker, his gallery arranged to have some of the work “stolen” to generate secondary publicity.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the performance was Booker’s efforts to close Twitter accounts of those who criticized the work or questioned his intentions. He formally ended the performance when Twitter suspended his own account after he re-posted alt-right memes under the heading, “Some call these memes harmless. Zero tolerance,” along with his comments that any portrayal whatsoever of such images is equivalent to direct endorsement of their content and effects.

I guess there's been some exchange between Bratton and Turner on Twitter. I didn't read much of it, but Bratton finally responded:

Luke, seriously, you should talk to someone who u trust & admire, who can sit u down and tell u, respectfully & honestly, that what you're doing is not what you imagine it to be. Not gaslighting; reality check. That person is not me cause I don't know you. Not engaging further. 

National Pizza Day

They didn't look like this, but the husband made me think of the father here.

I never liked pizza, but the best pizza I had was from a tiny shop in Boston. They baked bread and sold pizza by the slice. The couple looked terrible. They never spoke. I would guess they were Italian. The husband wore an old undershirt. They had this traumatized look in their eye, like their village had just been bombed by the allies. Just crust, sauce and cheese, but the crust was great, like bread. I've never seen anything like it since.

Allen vs Amazon

I thought it sounded like a terrible deal for Amazon anyway. They put a huge amount of money into Cafe Society. Allen's movies don't do that well. Woody Allen's been working on smaller and smaller budgets over the years and for pretty good reason. When he made Match Point, I heard he had no money for music and had to make a deal with a company that put out a CD of public domain recordings of Caruso.

That probably had as much to do with Amazon dropping him as anything else. They didn't know what they were doing, they tried to buy themselves respectability and they made a bad deal.

An attorney commented on Woody Allen's $68 million lawsuit against Amazon and didn't think Amazon had a leg to stand on.

From the Washington Post (owned by Amazon founder Bezos):

“’Frustration of purpose’ is a tough argument for Amazon to make because the allegations were already out there when they made the deal,” said Melanie Leslie, dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, emphasizing that she was evaluating the question on legal, not moral, grounds. “It’s hard for the company to say they didn’t realize what would happen — all they could say is that ‘market forces changed.’”

“And,” she added, “that’s just saying you made a bad deal. It’s not grounds for invalidating a contract.”

In Hollywood offices, a debate swirled about what the suit might mean for the larger entertainment community.

...

“If they’re not releasing the movie, they need to pay him out and let him release it elsewhere,” said a senior member of a top management firm, also speaking on condition of anonymity because of the charged nature of the topic. “To not do that sets a very dangerous precedent for the creative community. It means anyone could walk away from a deal without paying because the person is experiencing bad publicity. Where do you draw the line?”

Allen may get $68 million in free money. Dylan and Ronan will be foiled again. On top of that, they're walking around with the image of their Mom in a three-way with Woody Allen and a young (grownup) model seared into their imaginations. While they tremble in impotent rage, those of us who sort of like Allen are just amused.

Nobody likes Amazon. The world is on Woody Allen's side.

Stop trying to bring Woody Allen down

Mia Farrow through clinched teeth: "Shut up! Please just drop it already!"

Man. Think of that. $68 million. That's the minimum amount Woody Allen is demanding from Amazon. And Dylan and Ronan Farrow think they're bringing him down.

Mia Farrow keeps looking worse and worse, exposed as a child abuser, and there were the threesomes with a former teen model, her support for Roman Polanski and her brother in prison for child molestation. She said in an interview that she's forgotten Woody and wants to forget the whole thing and no wonder, but she created two monsters who aren't going to stop.

And Woody Allen keeps getting richer.

Albert Finney RIP

Albert Finney has died at 82. The first thing I remember him in was Murder on the Orient Express. I liked him in Gumshoe and The Entertainer. The last thing I saw him in was Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I've seen episodes of his 1959 British TV series, Emergency - Ward 10.

82 seems young to me now.

Ronan Farrow's decline

He should practice not smiling in every single picture.

Ronan Farrow said that his career was on the rocks before he latched onto the #MeToo thing. But where is it going now? His success with the Harvey Weinstein story may have been a fluke. He's gone back to attacking Woody Allen. When asked about the lack of evidence against Allen, he argued that there was no evidence against Weinstein either.

During the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Farrow appeared on MSNBC. He had found another accuser. But the accusation he reported seemed weak and when the host of the show expressed doubt, Farrow used the same argument----there was no evidence against Weinstein, either.

If that's going to be his standard of evidence from now on, I'd say he's on a downward spiral.

Liam Neeson again

Did I miss the boat on Liam Neeson? I don't know if I did or not. He was upset by his own actions, but was he was distressed that he was a murderous racist or was he distressed that he wanted revenge at all? I assumed he knew that his own racism was horribly wrong.  

Woody Allen strikes back

It's about time.

Woody Allen is suing Amazon for backing out of their deal for no legitimate reason. They've shelved his movie, Rainy Day in New York which they're contractually obligated to release. 

You know how I kept saying that Woody Allen should self-finance his movies? He was way ahead of me. The lawsuit claims that Amazon owes him $9 million that he spent making the movie. 

According to the New York Times:

Allen’s filing in New York federal court states: “Amazon has tried to excuse its action by referencing a 25-year-old, baseless allegation against Mr Allen, but that allegation was already well known to Amazon (and the public) before Amazon entered into four separate deals with Mr Allen – and, in any event it does not provide a basis for Amazon to terminate the contract … There simply was no legitimate ground for Amazon to renege on its promises.”

Allen also says he is owed $9m (£7m) by Amazon after financing the production of A Rainy Day in New York himself, and that Amazon committed to releasing the film for a minimum of 90 days. The complaint also says that Amazon attempted to terminate their agreements in June 2018 with no “legal or factual basis”.

Variety reports:

According to the suit, Amazon executives Jason Ropell and Matt Newman met with Allen’s representatives in December 2017, as the #MeToo movement was first gathering steam. The executives cited the reputational harm Amazon had suffered due to its association with Harvey Weinstein and the misconduct allegations against former Amazon Studios head Roy Price. In January 2018, the streamer’s general counsel, Ajay Patel, proposed delaying the release of “A Rainy Day in New York” until 2019, which Allen accepted.

The suit alleges that Patel sent a notice in June 2018 terminating the four-picture agreement, saying that Amazon had no intention to distribute any of the films. According to the suit, Patel did not provide a reason for terminating the deal. Subsequently, Amazon’s representatives stated they were canceling the agreement, due to “supervening events, including renewed allegations against Mr. Allen, his own controversial comments, and the increasing refusal of top talent to work with or be associated with him in any way, all of which have frustrated the purpose of the Agreement.”

The suit seeks $68 million in minimum guarantee payments arising from the four films, in addition to damages and attorneys fees. The suit was filed in the Southern District of New York.

Liam Neeson

Liam Neeson and friend.

Long, long ago, I posted something on here about morality and luck. You wouldn't think luck played any part in moral judgement, but look at the case of Liam Neeson who spent several days actively looking for Black men to murder with a metal pipe he carried for that purpose. It was by sheer chance he didn't find any. Now he's appeared on Good Morning America telling his uplifting story about how he decided that racist murder wasn't such a good idea after all.

He did this for a week, he said, after a friend was raped. She didn't know who raped her, so he asked what color he was, racist in itself, and she said he was Black.

Whites seem to have an easier time with this than Blacks although there are a couple of Blacks defending him. He confessed to it out of the blue. No one could have known about it otherwise. I'm sure he expected a different response.

There are reformed neo-Nazis who have been welcomed back to the human race, but I don't know if they confessed to actually setting out to kill people.

Mark Walhberg was a violent racist who targeted Black children and was charged with attempted murder against a Vietnamese.

According to Wikipedia:

In June 1986, Wahlberg and three friends chased after three black children while yelling "Kill the nigger, kill the nigger" and throwing rocks at them.[13] The next day, Wahlberg and others followed a group of schoolchildren taking a field trip on a beach, yelled racial epithets at them, threw rocks at them and "summoned other white males who joined" in the harassment.[13] In August 1986, civil action was filed against Wahlberg for violating the civil rights of his victims, and the case was later settled the next month.[14][15][16] 

In April 1988, Wahlberg approached a middle-aged Vietnamese man named Thanh Lam on the street and, using a large wooden stick, struck him in the head until he was knocked unconscious while calling him a "Vietnam fucking shit". That same day, Wahlberg also attacked a second Vietnamese man named Hoa "Johnny" Trinh, punching him in the eye without provocation. According to court documents regarding these crimes, when Wahlberg was arrested later that night and returned to the scene of the first assault, he stated to police officers: "You don't have to let him identify me, I'll tell you now that's the mother-fucker whose head I split open."[17] Investigators also noted that Wahlberg "made numerous unsolicited racial statements about 'gooks' and 'slant-eyed gooks'".[18][19]

It's a shame Wahlberg wasn't shot and left to die in the gutter. He demanded a pardon a few years ago, but there was no basis for him getting one except that he's a movie star. He never even admitted that his crimes were racist. If it hasn't wrecked his career, it should. I'm sure he's not as horrible as he was, but that's an effect of aging more than anything else.

I may have missed something, but I didn't know either of these guys were ever that great.

Liam Neeson.

Hawaii Five-0: A brief review

I just watched a little under two minutes of it. First time I've looked at it since the pilot. Scott Caan seems to have dropped his moronic New Jersey accent. He's always unshaven yet he doesn't have a hair out of place. Jack Lord wore an elaborate wig and his hair looked far more natural.

I won't watch that again.

The Swimmer (1968)

Frolicking with the babysitter.

So I watched The Swimmer finally after all these years. Burt Lancaster as a surprisingly healthy, athletic rich WASP who wears only a swimsuit. He out somewhere dressed like this for some reason and decides to swim home by going from swimming pool to swimming pool---a river of swimming pools leading to his house on the hill.

"That's more hiking than swimming," someone comments, and he's not wearing shoes. It seems that his life has fallen apart but he doesn't remember any of it. His friends look disturbed when he tells them his daughters are home playing tennis.

As it progresses, the people whose swimming pools he uses are less and less happy to see him. He's not as pitiful as you might have suspected. There's a woman he had been sleeping with while married who he cleverly dumped in a fancy restaurant so she wouldn't make a scene, he hits on the girl who used to babysitter for him, a Black chauffeur (Bernie Hamilton) gives him a ride up the driveway and we find out he's a racist; he's an anti-Semite. He crashes a pool party of a nouveau riche couple he had always snubbed and he stops at a public swimming pool where he runs into locals he still owes money to.

He stops at the home of an elderly nudist couple who mercifully remain seated and concealed, but Lancaster has thoughtfully removed his swimsuit and we see him walking away from the camera.

It's clear that his life has fallen apart and they hint at why, but it's not clear how he happens to be back in the old neighborhood or what sent him off the deep end. Based on a short story by John Cheever.

Do actors do this?

Gene Wilder

Actors say what seem like terribly unkind things to each other. Cloris Leachman told Corey Haim that his half smile was cute but he did it too much and said he should practice keeping his mouth closed---he always thought it was cute to always go around with his mouth open. Mia Farrow's mother told her she would be equally convincing as a Good Girl or a slut. And a local actress interviewed on Community Access TV said she was terribly hurt when she told her acting professor she was going to Hollywood and he suggested she look at Hollywood actresses because she looked nothing like them. There was a high school acting teacher who told a girl she walked funny so she worked for years to change the way she walked.

Charles Grodin wrote in one of his books that he was given the task of telling a young Gene Wilder that he was never going to make it as an actor and it was time to give it up.

Paul Peterson, when the Donna Reed Show went off the air, said he tried to continue working as an actor but Mickey Rooney finally come over to tell him it was a lost cause.

I was just driving home from the grocery store with NPR on listening to a woman tell how her closed-minded parents thought she should get a good job and live a normal life instead of pursuing her dream, whatever that was. But even if you're successful in some creative endeavor, it probably won't last long. Acting careers, for example, peter out. A lot of actors did very well for a time and wound up as realtors. Victor Mature had a TV repair shop. Tommy Kirk went into carpet cleaning.

You have some poor devils like Dustin Diamond who won't let go. He's 42, his life is going nowhere, but he doesn't have much alternative, especially now that he's an ex-convict.

Bob Denver, TV's Gilligan, starred on stage in Play It Again, Sam, taking over Woody Allen's role. Horshack is big on Broadway. There's nothing like that for Diamond. Maybe he could have done local TV commercials if hadn't been for the sex tape.

Poor devil looks terrible. He's grown a beard which is probably all he can do about it. He should try to maintain a neutral expression at all times, maybe try different wigs or hats. He needs to lose weight. Or maybe gain lots and lots of weight. I'm really not the one to give advice.