Michael Wolff on Ronan Farrow

From Michael Wolff on Ronan Farrow in his new book, Too Famous:

For NBC, this—Farrow as crusading investigator—was a confusing development on a number of fronts. First, NBC had fired him. And yet here he was proposing a major investigative effort—an odd bit of not getting the we-don’t-really-think-much-of-you message. And, at best, he was a mere rookie reporter, with scant journalism background and little support in the organization—and he wants to do what?

And then there’s the Allen thing. Certainly, in conventional reporting terms, you’d naturally question the appearance of bias here. This person whose life story was bound up in one of the most controversial charges of sex abuse of all time was now asking—demanding—to represent the network in a dicey sex abuse exposé. (In Catch and Kill he dismisses even the suggestion that there might be legitimate concerns about bias as preposterous.) And there was yet another, sotto voce, aspect of this. Many in the news division didn’t believe the Farrow family’s Allen story. This had become something of a generational divide. Younger people seemed to blindly accept the Farrow version, while older people—and these were older media people running NBC News—were skeptical. Some, in fact, believed the story to be flatly false and that it only achieved younger generation credibility in a Trumpian way, with the baldness and magnitude and repetition of the Farrow family claims.

 ...

What if none of the accusations against Woody Allen are true? Allen, after nearly thirty years, continues to deny every meaningful detail of the claims, with no one else coming forward to support them, and with the Farrow children divided over their veracity. But not only that, what if Ronan Farrow has pursued the vendetta against his father knowing it was a likely fake? The account by Ronan’s brother Moses (starkly refuting almost every one of his mother’s central claims about the alleged molestation), who was fourteen at the time of his mother’s accusations against Allen and present at the time of the alleged incident—Ronan was five— certainly suggests you would need to be willfully blind not to have major doubts.

Read more here:

https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/michael-wolff-roasts-ronan-farrow-and-defends-woody-allen-in-new-book-too-famous/

The American President (1995) Rob Reiner

Imagine the reaction in the bourgeois press if a movie like this had been made in any Communist country, or even a modestly progressive country. Or even a somewhat conservative neo-liberal country the U.S. decided to hate. If it had been about a Russian president who starts dating again after losing his wife.

Here's an actual line from the movie:

"Sydney, the man is the leader of the free world! He's brilliant, funny, handsome!"

I was surprised to learn that not everyone thought this abomination was a morbid romantic fantasy about Bill Clinton getting over Hillary's death.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

I didn't like George Lazenby's frilly see-though tuxedo shirt. He was the least experienced actor to play James Bond, but he was the one who had to show he had feelings. I didn't think he was that bad. He gets married at the end but things don't go well. All the movies in this series were disappointments.

With Diana Rigg and Telly Savalas. 

Free on Pluto.

I checked. Telly Savalas had earlobes in real life.

Bad News Bears Breaking Training (1977)

Why did I watch this?

Child actor Alfred Lutter III's last movie after a short but distinguished career working with Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese. 

The Bad News Bears was about a terrible boys' baseball team with an alcoholic coach. In the 1977 sequel,  they're so good that they're going to the Astrodome to play. 

The overweight kid from the original movie lost weight, and good for him, but they replaced him in the sequel. The others all seemed to be there except Tatum O'Neal and they added Jimmy Baio.

William Devane as Jackie Earle Haley's estranged father who pretends to be their coach.

The original movie was about how kids shouldn't be abused and pressured to compete. This one had nothing to say, although the racist kid seemed more racist than before.

 

Nothing much

Listened to a little news about the upheaval in the movie industry caused by COVID-19. Everything is being delayed. It was okay with me. I don't want to see a James Bond movie or anything based on a comic book. I don't know if this will be a boon to cinema, but it couldn't make it much worse.

When Woody Allen's Rainy Day in New York became the top grossing movie in the world, he quipped that all it took was a deadly global pandemic to put him on top.

I watched a little of a low budget western. Soldiers go out somewhere and are surrounded by Indians.

I watched only the first several minutes. It looked very well-made with what they said were authentic uniforms. It was filmed on a western set like the one where they were filming Rust. But I looked it up on IMDb, read the user comments, and there was nothing but seething hatred against it. Not because they made Indians the villains, but because it wasn't up to Steven Spielberg standards.

One person was outraged that there were any positive reviews at all and seriously suggested that IMDb remove them because they were obviously wrong. 

I might have felt the same way if I had watched another twenty minutes. One person said that people made the movie just to make a movie. Which could have been true, but even if it were, there have been perfectly good movies made just for the sake of making a movie. How many movies did Roger Corman make because he had a few days before he had to tear down a set? Didn't Pudovkin make Storm Over Asia because he happened to be in Mongolia or someplace that looked like Mongolia?

I bring this up because I started this post with nothing to say. I just haven't posted anything in a few days and thought I'd better write something. I posted for the sake of posting.

I haven't watched anything I want to admit to. On Amazon, they had these really cheap DVDs of sadly unerotic 1950's "pornography". I'm always amused at the extreme low end of commercial cinema, so I ordered one. They're from a company that puts out old public domain B movies.

A series of short films. I thought they might have sort of a storyline, that the "filmmakers" might have seen them as a stepping stone to slightly more lavish productions,  but I was disappointed. 

It was six bucks with free shipping. If I saw it in a store I would have bought it on impulse, although, there, you could pay cash and wouldn't have the purchase etched indelibly onto your permanent record.

 

Now that I think about it, in those days, wasn't pornography all produced by the Mafia? There was some nonsense that it was all being produced by Communists--- some congressman claimed that photographers, film crews and naked ladies converged on a town in Poland to produce all the dirty pictures and movies that were destroying the West. But if the Soviets produced it, it would have been so much better. The movies would have been well-lit and had a little story.

No, this was the work of the Mafia. The dirty, stinking Mafia.

Anyone could make a dirty movie, obviously, but the Mafia would simply steal it. This continued until someone in the FBI realized that enforcing copyright would be an easy way to go after organized crime.

Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

The opening scenes are of Gregory Peck with ten- or eleven-year-old Dean Stockwell as his son. They filmed the master shots on the streets of New York and the dialogue in the studio in front of rear screen projections. It worked very well. It was reportedly less apparent that they did it this way before high definition video.

Gregory Peck as a journalist assigned the task of writing a series on anti-Semitism. It will be called "I was a Jew for Six Months". They couldn't just have a Jewish guy write it? 

"I've been having my nose rubbed in it and I don't like the smell."

In an early scene, Peck has to explain to Dean Stockwell what anti-Semitism is. He says that some people hate Catholics, some hate Jews.

"And nobody hates us because we're American," his son observes.

"Uh, well, no."

Peck is thrown out of an expensive hotel, his son is harassed by Jew-hating children, he learns from his secretly Jewish secretary that the liberal magazine he works for doesn't hire Jews, and his girlfriend, Dorothy McGuire, tolerates anti-Semitism among her callous, bourgeois friends.

I first saw this when I was in high school. A couple of years later, when I saw Caddyshack, I got it when Rodney Dangerfield told his Asian friend, "I hear this place is restricted, Wang, so don't tell them you're Jewish."

With John Garfield. Sam Jaffe as a Professor Lieberman. They mention Palestine and Zionism in passing without noting any irony. Dean Stockwell was amazing as a child actor.

Free on The Criterion Channel.

 

Dean Stockwell, RIP

Dean Stockwell has died at 85.

As a child, he was Gregory Peck's son in Gentleman's Agreement, and was later in The Boy With the Green Hair, an anti-war movie that helped get the director blacklisted.

The main thing I remember him from is Compulsion which I saw on TV several times as a kid. Learned about the Leopold & Loeb case and it taught me that seemingly pitiful young men still might rape or murder you.

Three-day movies

I heard that there were companies that specialize in three-day movies. But what companies? What movies did they make? I heard they weren't very good, but in what ways? What do people want from a three day movie and how much can you get away with?

Finally found one. A guy named Clay Moffatt has an interview on YouTube. He discusses his movies which are generally shot in three or four days. He's a restaurant manager by trade so I didn't take it seriously until I looked him up and found he has several movies on Tubi and Amazon Prime. 

I watched a couple of them. They tended to have fewer than ten actors and were mostly filmed on one location. Mostly horror movies although he did a couple of teen spy movies with larger casts that he may have spent more time on.

One of his tips was to not shoot unnecessary retakes. 

I didn't like the naturalistic dialogue in part because I disliked the characters.

The sound wasn't great in one and the handheld camera shook a little too much in another. Jump cuts helped move things along which was fine with me. Movies ALL look pretty good now. It's not like the old days.

Jory (1973) Robby Benson.

Jory's father is a lawyer who plays classical music on a saloon's out-of-tune piano. He gets himself killed by continuing to antagonize a much larger man even after he pulls a knife on him.

Jory (Robby Benson), watches the murder through the window.

Now an orphan, Jory unwisely confronts the killer.

"Why did you kill my father?"

It seems like a skinny teen killing a big violent drunk with a rock would be an obvious case of self defense, but Jory flees the area by joining men driving a herd of horses to Texas. 

This happens in the first ten minutes so I'm not giving anything away.

Coming of age stories always have a Young Adult feel to them. That was the case here even though the boy kills people.  Later, he sees a naked girl swimming.

A cowboy introduces Jory to shooting which turns out to be a natural ability rather than an acquired skill.

Robby Benson must have been sixteen or seventeen playing a 15-year-old. His first major role. He spoke very softly and he must have cried a few times, but it was the most ruggedly masculine role any young boy could ever hope to play.

Available on YouTube.

I never heard the name "Jory" before. I googled it and looked at a website for baby names. It's unisex and means "farmer". And, in 1973, when this movie was released, it had a spike in popularity.

This is the last Dracula thing

I listened to the novel Dracula on tape one time. The main thing I remember is the men going off to kill Dracula. I thought it was strange that they never had any self-doubt. None of them thought that maybe they got caught up in the moment and that vampires obviously don't exist and they could get into a lot of trouble for what they were planning to do.

The end of the Francis Ford Coppola version was more true to the book. I don't think this is a spoiler, but a cowboy kills Dracula with a Bowie knife.

Are vampires a Christian thing or a natural phenomenon? Why does Dracula recoil at the sight of a crucifix? Why wouldn't a vampire have a reflection in a mirror? There's no religious or scientific explanation for that.

Spanish langauge Dracula (1931) etc

I don't know how long it's been. I went to the doctor. They tried to hand me a diagnostic questionnaire but I'd already gotten it off the internet and filled it out. My answers, according to the thing I read, meant I likely had ADHD. It would explain a lot. But the doctor pooh-poohed it and wouldn't give me Adderall in any case, which wasn't necessarily what I wanted, although why does everybody get Adderall but me?  Woody Allen mentioned Adderall in his memoir, it turns out my brother-in-law takes it and he has a family history of heart disease, too. All the college students take it. It's a crime, but they openly sell it to each other. 

Well, I looked into it and realized I wasn't getting nearly as much caffeine in my diet as I thought. It's the poor man's Adderall. Rather than struggle to ingest enough semi-naturally, never knowing how much I was actually getting, I bought a jar of caffeine pills. But now I keep forgetting to take them. And when I remember, I think, okay, I'll take some caffeine. Then, after a little while I think, Did I just take one? I can't remember.

You don't think that's a sign of ADHD? If I can't take generic caffeine pills responsibly, I probably shouldn't be trusted with a Schedule 2 controlled substance.

In spite of my dwindling attention span, I managed to sit through the Spanish-language version of Dracula (1931) filmed at the same time as the Bela Lugosi version on the same sets. I've heard it was considered better than the English version but it's been so long since I've seen it, I couldn't compare. It was better than I thought it would be. 

By the way, was Werner Herzog's Nosferatu really that great? He's German and did terrible things to the rats in the movie. 

These movies people watch for Halloween are really grim. People dying horrible deaths. They're not as fun as people seem to think.

Halloween, 2021

I went to the store on Halloween looking for Halloween candy. They had other decorations, but no candy. I didn't see pumpkins either. I bought fun size Almond Joys and some Christmas candy. Thought about buying candy canes, but I assumed I'd have to eat them myself and I never liked those things.

I thought the lack of candy meant there would be no trick or treaters.

In the parking lot, there was a boy dressed as Elvis and a girl wearing a costume version of an old Girl Scout uniform, so I should have known there'd be trick or treating.

A large group came to the door.

"Take all you want!" I said. And one girl grabbed a huge handful. I didn't think they'd go for Almond Joys. Maybe she didn't know what they were. 

That one group cleaned out most of the candy. I opened the second bags.

Another group, all siblings I would imagine, took a large amount. One girl took a huge handful. Dropped one on the ground and instead of putting it in her bag returned it to the bowl.

Then some poor devil, may have been about eleven, came to the door in what looked like Batman pajamas. He was alone. I gave him his candy. Told him to take more.

In the past, I've had older or older-looking kids come to the door. The teenagers seem kind of embarrassed and will only take one. You have to encourage them. They are guests at your door and you should be polite.

I had a friend who trick-or-treated at sixteen because he needed the food. He was malnourished. He was arrested one night when he was thirteen while searching for food in a dumpster. He thought they would feed him in juvenile detention but it was too late. Dinner was over. He thought he'd get to eat in the morning, but his otherwise negligent mother rushed down before breakfast to get him out.

Also, he was a potentially dangerous juvenile delinquent. When he said "trick or treat" he may have really meant it. Just give teenagers their candy and don't try to shame them.