Ratings continue to drop on the HBO "documentary", Farrow v. Allen.

Again, from Showbiz 411:

There’s been a decline in interest every week since the series, made by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, began three weeks ago. This week’s episode should show even fewer viewers as it has no revelations or invented facts to present. The fourth episode is just Ronan Farrow crabbing about Woody Allen’s former publicist, and others kvetching about nothing.

Indeed, Dick and Ziering have run out of steam. Since they refused to make a balanced film, or entertain any other ideas, or explore Mia Farrow’s crazy, suicidal, criminal family, they have nothing left to say.

HBO is taking a bath with this series. Just a few months ago, they had Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant pulling a million viewers in for “The Undoing.” Now they’ve squandered this valuable real estate on junk.

The real meanness here is what should be discussed: how Mia Farrow turned Dylan into a professional victim for the rest of her life, how Mia hates Soon Yi enough to try and destroy her as well as Woody, and their college age daughters. Mia has no love for any of these people. She’s just wallowed in spite for almost 30 years.

Harry & Meghan interview

 

It sounds interesting. The British Royal Family is worse than most of us imagined. Of course, Harry was no picnic either. He told an interviewer that killing Afghans from the safety of his helicopter was fun because it was like a video game. Meghan Markle can't be much of a prize marrying that borderline human. 

Harry stomped out of England in a huff but he's still just the acorn. You have to look at the hideously twisted, racist oak from which he fell. After Diana died, people kept calling William "Pugsly", arguing that he may seem fine now, but how could he come out of that family as anything but the monster we now know him to be?

I still don't think I'll watch the interview. There's got to be a YouTube video showing just the highlights.

Murder Among the Mormons

I canceled Netflix but still have time left on it. Oprah's two hour interview with "Prince" Harry and Meghan Markle was on, but I didn't think I could stand it, so I watched this instead. I had read a book about it called Salamander, so I knew about the case. There weren't any surprises except that the cops weren't nearly as on-the-ball as I thought.

Utah police suspected a somewhat innocent Mormon guy of the murders because they found a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook when they searched his basement. And a submachine gun. So they had very good reason to suspect him.

I had a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook when I was in high school. I bought it strictly as a novelty. I had zero interest in drugs and explosives would have terrified me. My guess was that the author had come up with a pretty good title and decided his work was done because there was nothing in the book that should have alarmed or been of any use to anyone. I had read a couple books from the school library advocating gun control that provided far more troubling information, like how to make a zip gun. 

So, the documentary was about a case in the '80's. A Mormon who had secretly become an atheist makes a lot of money as a documents forger while undermining the church with what he claimed were early Mormon documents. 

Oh, and then he uses bombs to murder three people when his enterprise starts falling apart.

"Prince" Harry, Meghan Markle

"Trouble with England, it's all pomp and no circumstance. You're very wise to get out of it, escape while you can."

--Humphrey Bogart as Billy Dannreuther in Beat the Devil (1953)

Some new movie about Napoleon

 From Counterpunch:

The Unbearable Magic of Hollywood Casting: I see Ridley Scott has cast the great Jodie Comer to play Josephine to Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon in the curiously titled “Kitbag.” Josephine was 7 years older than Napoleon and Phoenix is 20 years older than Comer. (I wonder if Comer knows that by the time Napoleon married Josephine, she’d lost most of her teeth & the ones that remained were black and cavity-snaggled, owing to her habit of sucking sugar cubes, which acquired as a young girl on the family’s sugarcane plantation in Martinique…) It wasn’t the great romance it’s been made out to be. Josephine, as Napoleon insisted on calling the woman everyone else knew as Rose, hopped into bed with one of NB’s arch rivals, Barras, about five minutes after he left for his Italian campaign, which was about 5 minutes after they got married, which was about 4.5 minutes longer than sex with Napoleon lasted, according to even his own self-flattering accounts. He was, as he boasted, a busy man. 

Young Ahmed (Belgium, 2019)

It seems insane to demonize well-behaved children, but look at all the things---Tom Sawyer for one---where bratty kids are the heroes and obedient children are actual villains. There was a Danish sit-com on Netflix where a free-spirited teacher calls a girl a Nazi because she does her homework and tries to do well in school.

On the other hand, Young Ahmed is about a dyslexic tween who is deeply religious, has a strong sense of morality and likes to please at least some of the grown-ups. He's a member of a fundamentalist Wahhabi mosque and tries to murder his teacher for heresy.

There was no harm done and the court sends him to an honor farm. Normally, they'd probably WANT a juvenile delinquent to find religion. In this case, they should get him to loosen up, but in one scene, when he wants to go someplace with a girl he's made friends with, they remind him it's almost time for his afternoon prayers.

Available on the Criterion Channel. Directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won Best Director at Cannes.

Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Timothee Chalamet was terribly thin. There wasn't much meat on those bones, which in real life would be a deal-breaker for Armie Hammer. You know. Because of the cannibalism thing.

When I was in high school, I knew kids from families like the one in this movie. The fathers and in some cases the mothers were university professors, the parents encouraged those artistic interests that could get their kids into college and the children would freely swear and talk about sex in front of them.

In this movie, Chalamet plays classical piano and cheerfully tells his father he came that close to having sex with his girlfriend, but he keeps his relationship with Hammer a secret.

I don't know what the two saw in each other. Neither one of them was likable or pleasant.

Made for three million dollars. They get more for their money in Europe, but they filmed mostly around the villa.

In the end, it turns out that Chalamet's father was hip to what he and Hammer had been up to. If I understood him correctly, he tells his son that it was good that he got to be some guy's love object. He says he missed his own chance when he was young and that when you hit middle age, no one wants anything to do with you sex-wise. 

It made me think of the French movie Young and Beautiful. A bourgeois high school girl is forced to give up prostitution when an old rich guy dies on her. She talks to his widow (Charlotte Rampling) who says that she wishes she had been a prostitute when she was young.