Godard's Film Socialisme

I don't pretend to be a movie critic. I don't know what to say about these things. But I watched Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme (2010) now available for instant viewing on Netflix, and thought it was pretty good.

I'm looking at the description on Netflix. They say it's a "character-driven drama".

Really? It was a drama? Those were characters? I didn't follow it at all, then. The weird abbreviated subtitles weren't much help.

It was filmed on the cruise ship the Costa Concordia two years before it wrecked off the coast of Italy.

Watch it and see if I'm an idiot for not recognizing the drama.

Well, Godard's okay. Didn't he have a 35mm movie camera made for him that was as easy to use as a Super 8 camera, all automatic? Cannon had its Canon Scoopic, a 16mm movie camera built like a Super 8 camera, with built in zoom lens, automatic exposure, automatic threading, intended as a newsreel camera. For Film Socialisme, Godard used digital video.

It's all static camera shots which Godard used in the last few movies of his I've seen, and it worked very well. The movie looked great. Filming everything static camera is so much nicer than filming everything with a handheld camera.

I wish he didn't leave in all the wind noise, though.

What does Moses think?

Poor Moses Farrow. As a kid, he was in a different age group from all the other kids, too young for the older kids and too old for the younger kids. He was isolated within the family. He was the only one without a father---the older ones had Andre Previn, the younger ones had Woody Allen. Moses was adopted by Woody Allen, but not until he was twelve or so.

But even now, pretty-boy Ronan, (formerly Seamus, formerly Sean, formerly Satchel,) gets all the attention.

Moses is now a marriage counselor. He's the one who ought to be commenting on this, on Mia Farrow sleeping with her married ex-husband at the same time she was in a relationship with Woody Allen, even falsely naming Allen as the father of her illegitimate spawn. What would a marriage counselor say about this?

Moses must have chosen this field for a reason.

From The Daily Beast:

Moses Farrow, now 36, and an accomplished photographer, has been estranged from Mia for several years. During a recent conversation, he spoke of “finally seeing the reality” of Frog Hollow and used the term “brainwashing” without hesitation. He recently reestablished contact with Allen and is currently enjoying a renewed relationship with him and Soon-Yi. 

This post was written before Moses spoke publicly about it. Here's another entry posted after:

http://cinemasmear.blogspot.com/2014/02/moses-farrow-speaks-out.html

Woody Allen innocent--Mia a monster--and Ronan's just a mess

Ronan Farrow

Frank Sinatra

 

It's like Peyton Place.

Mia was sleeping with Frank Sinatra, an elderly married man in the first stages of senile dementia. This while she was in a quasi-common-law marriage with Woody Allen. She tags Woody as the father of Sinatra's love child. She gets Woody to adopt a few of her children, but, perhaps because she's sleeping with Frank Sinatra and God knows who else, Woody senses that they're growing apart. So he turns to her adopted daughter, Soon-yi. They go to basketball games, and he takes pornographic Polaroids of her.

And now, Ronan----like Russ Tamblyn in the original Peyton Place----is locked in an Oedipal nightmare. Kind of a one-sided Oedipal conflict since I can't imagine Woody Allen checking Twitter to see what Frank Sinatra's illegitimate bi-sexual son thinks.

I find it rather odd that Ronan puts all his comments about Woody allegedly molesting his (Ronan's) sister in joke form. And why would any mother retweet jokes about her daughter being molested? Is this what they've been doing around their rent-controlled apartment all these years, sitting around making incest jokes? How exactly should Dylan (now "Malone") feel about this?

Woody and Soon-yi's marriage has lasted longer than both of Mia's marriages combined. Her marriage to Frank lasted, what, a year or two? She broke up Andre Previn's first marriage, married him, then dumped him like a sack of potatoes.

Now it turns out that Mia lied in court, naming Allen as Ronan's father when her conduct was such that it could have been any bum off the street.

Sinatra was human garbage with his ties to the mafia. He bragged about hanging around with murderers, and Mia loved it. She was cackling on the phone when Sinatra called and offered to have Woody murdered.

Woody is innocent after all

During the whole Woody-Mia break-up, I just kind of assumed Woody was guilty of the molestation thing. Now I rather doubt it.

If it were true, would Mia keep defending Roman Polanski? Would she be retweeting Ronan's jokes about it? Would Ronan be joking about it on Twitter unless joking about it was normal in his family? And would it be normal in his family if it were true?

And on top of that we have Mia suddenly announcing that Frank Sinatra is probably Ronan's father. Either she's lying now or she's been lying about it for the last twenty-five years. If Sinatra was Ronan's father, then Mia lied in court and fraudulently collected a fortune in child support from Allen.

As Allen has said, why would he wait until he was in the middle of a custody battle to suddenly become a child molester?

Golden Globes, Woody Allen, Ronan Farrow

I guess he does look a little like Frank Sinatra.

I'm sitting here watching The Golden Globes. I've seen nothing and I only identify with the losers. I have to use Google to figure out the gags.

Tina Fey stopped in the middle of some scripted quip and said, "I can't do this", which turns out to be a cruel reference to Hollywood millionaire Michael Bay getting panicky and fleeing the stage at some event celebrating a new Samsung television. Which I can understand, but why on earth did he get up there in the first place? He's fabulously wealthy. Surely he didn't need the money. He explained on his blog that he's just enthused over the TV.

Woody Allen, Diane Keaton

They seem to have bleeped Diane Keaton talking about Woody Allen, when she said "God damn it". You can say "damn it" on TV, but not "God damn it" because that's actual blasphemy. To me, it was fitting since the first time I had seen this bleeped out on TV was when Woody Allen said "Fly, goddamnit, fly!" in an early scene in Sleeper.

They seem to have censored something else Keaton said, but I don't read lips.

I googled it and she recently said "fuck" on Good Morning America.

Ronan Farrow

Ronan Farrow tweeted:

"Missed the Woody Allen tribute - did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?" 

Ronan needs to stop this. Comments about your sister being sexually violated should never be in joke form.

If I were Ronan, I would hope Woody was my father. Frank Sinatra died at 82 and already had signs of dementia. Woody's mother died at 96, his father at 100. His father had a job when he was 90. And look at Woody himself, 78 and going strong. He'll be one of those guys directing movies at 100.

Roger Ebert's top ten lists

I went through all of Roger Ebert's Top Ten lists he put out each year from the 1967 until his death.

Read them here: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/eberts-10-best-lists-1967-present

Not surprisingly, the older the list, the more movies I had seen from it.

I haven't seen any of the movies on the lists from 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2006.

Saw one on 2007's list, one from 2004, two from 2001.

I saw eight from 1967, seven from 1968, six from 1969, six from 1970.

1979, I saw all ten.

I saw only four of his "Best Films of the 1980s", but seven of the "Best Films of the 1990s".


Ebert tended to give things more stars than they deserved. Especially Lone Wolf McQuade. But it's subjective anyway and you just have to know what you're reading.

Chick Chandler

That's weird. I keep turning on old movies and seeing Chick Chandler. Right now, I'm watching him play an effeminate angel in a short film from the '50s advocating the use of telephones as a decorating accessory. It's quite bad.

Watched a movie where he played a disgraced alcoholic ex-cop who has to find his kidnapped child.

He had some range there as an actor.

Rockford Files, etc

Watching old episodes of The Rockford Files.

He never finds clues or actual evidence of anyone's guilt. Just kind of figures out who was motivated by what.

Now watching an oddly anti-Armenian episode I don't remember having ever seen before. Could it be a dig at Mannix starring Armenian-American Mike Conners? I doubt it.

John Saxon

Had John Saxon in one episode. Says, "Wanna bet," at one point, an apparent reference to his role in Enter the Dragon. Roy Jenson appeared in one episode and addresses James Garner as "old stick", a reference to Jenson's role in the private eye movie Harper with Paul Newman.

Roy Jenson

Jenson was the first guy to be beaten up by David Carradine on Kung Fu.

John Saxon was offered the role of Kwai Chang Caine on Kung Fu. He turned it down and it went to David Carradine. Saxon knew the story---that the role was supposed to go to Bruce Lee, but the network didn't want a show starring a Chinese guy---a "yellow man", they called him, according to Mako.

Mako

Later, when Saxon went to Hong Kong for Enter the Dragon and met Bruce Lee, Lee told him the story about the show Kung Fu, about how the role was taken from him because if his race. Saxon wasn't sure whether to tell him he was offered the role and doesn't remember if he did tell him.

Bruce Lee was in the movie Marlowe starring James Garner as Philip Marlowe. Garner uses the same ploy on Lee that he uses against a karate guy in an episode of The Rockford Files. Accuses him of homosexuality so that he becomes enraged and throws a kick and----well, I don't want to ruin it for you.

Garner mentioned in a long interview available on YouTube that another private eye show was stealing storylines from The Rockford Files until they went over and told them to knock it off. He wouldn't say what the show was, but it must have been Simon and Simon----I watched it when it was on and noticed that they swiped a storyline.

Silly to plagiarize a current show. Always steal from an obscure source.

Lee H. Montgomery as "Cricket"

I tried to watch Charlie's Angels in the '70s, but the one episode I saw was exactly the same as an episode of The Mod Squad I hated in which a chubby autistic kid called "Cricket" (Lee Montgomery) shoots Julie and is pursued by the violent criminal whose gun he found. Will Pete and Linc find him before the criminal gets to him?

Of course, Charlies Angels and The Mod Squad were both Aaron Spelling productions.