Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
By Chris Michaud
NEW YORK (Reuters) — As a little kid, future filmmaker Woody Allen was preoccupied with three things – baseball, magic and murder.
It’s that last one that serves as the grist for his latest film, Irrational Man, which opens in U.S. movie theaters on Friday.
In Irrational Man, Allen explores themes of morality, infidelity, passivity and mortality, familiar ground for fans of earlier fare such as Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery and Match Point.
Joaquin Phoenix plays a disaffected philosophy professor, Abe, who has all but checked out of life until he meets a star pupil portrayed by Emma Stone. Through a random overheard conversation in a diner, Abe regains his footing and purpose by hatching a plot to do away with an apparently immoral, inept and corrupt judge. He rationalizes his plan as a deed that will make the world a better place.
“It interests me,” Allen, 79, director of more than 45 films, said of murder. It’s “the stuff of drama,” from the Greeks to Shakespeare, he said, like magic and baseball, has been a life-long fascination.
Although best known for his comedies, Allen told reporters that Irrational Man is for him “a serious picture from start to finish.”
If “people find amusing things in it, I myself didn’t put them there… but, look, if it gets a laugh, that’s how I set my table,” he said.
For that he credits his cast, which includes Parker Posey as a professor who fills out the love triangle with Phoenix and Stone. Still, some amusement factor is evidenced in what Allen said was his original title: “Crazy Abe.”
Allen’s films over the years have attracted top acting talent, despite a much lower salary than many of his stars can command in Hollywood.
But with well-practiced public modesty, the Oscar-winning director and writer praises his actors, saying, “All I do is try not to screw them up.
“These people are all doing fine before they met me. There’s nothing to learn (from me).”
To wit, he will begin his next film in August with Bruce Willis, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively and Posey, among others.
“They’ll take it because they like to act,” he said.
For himself, Allen said he has come to find fame and fortune empty and joyless.”
“The only payoff is the act of making the film,” he said.
By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times
Piers Morgan out, Ronan Farrow in.
On Sunday, CNN confirmed that “Piers Morgan Live” will be ending next month, proving that a large Twitter following and pedigree of minor non-journalistic celebrity (though a former editor, Morgan, 48, was mostly known as a judge on “Britain’s” and then “America’s Got Talent”) does not necessarily a successful news host make.
Then on Monday, MSNBC debuted the first hour of “Ronan Farrow Daily,” proving that a large Twitter following and a pedigree of minor non-journalistic celebrity (though a contributor to many news organizations including this one, Farrow, 26, is mostly known as the super-smart son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen) remain acceptable news host credentials nonetheless.
Forget the judging panel on “American Idol,” or even the Leno/ Fallon, Fallon/ Meyers handoff; it’s the hosts of our cable news shows that mirror the increasingly messy line between social and media, between profession and personality.
While Farrow was earnestly interviewing former Defense Secretary Bill Cohen and David Axelrod on Monday about the crisis in Ukraine, many people were far more interested in reacting to Morgan’s ouster on Twitter and the blogosphere. Some did so in joy, a few in woe, but most wondered why Morgan had failed so spectacularly in the prime-time slot that Larry King made famous (before beginning to fail there himself.)
Just as if we didn’t know. He tanked because he’s insufferable.
Morgan would like everyone to believe that Americans didn’t warm to him because he was a “British guy debating American cultural issues, including guns, which has been very polarizing.” Never mind that many news hosts and commentators have been outspoken about gun control or that with our near-hysteria devotion to “Downton Abbey,” Kate Middleton and Benedict Cumberbatch, most Americans have all but applied for dual citizenship with the U.K.
No, it wasn’t the cricket references or the football (as in soccer) issue. Morgan failed as a host because he was smug, arrogant, condescending and thin-skinned. He failed because he was more interested in keeping his name in the news than in the news itself.
As recently as two weeks ago, when a guest (transgender author and activist Janet Mock) complained about the sensationalistic nature of Morgan’s questions, he “apologized” by having her back on the show and reprimanded her for the caustic response on Twitter. When Stephen Colbert sent up Morgan’s response and interviewed Mock, Morgan continued to rant on social media.
Watching him repeatedly foment his own controversy, then “report” in high dudgeon about his treatment in the wake of it, television audiences were reminded, once again, of the prescient wisdom of James L. Brooks’ “Broadcast News.” “Let’s never forget,” says Albert Brooks sarcastically as TV reporter Aaron Altman, “we’re the real story. Not them.”
Enter Farrow, who sailed through a dutifully disparate array of topics during his first hour with the slightly anxious confidence of the star student enlisted to run the class.
He covered the Ukraine crisis from pathos to policy — what will Russia do? How does it affect the U.S.? — pausing to explain, with a map, why exactly Ukraine is such a mess. He discussed budget cuts at the Pentagon, the governors’ meeting at the White House, a possible rise in the minimum wage and, in the show’s only truly light-hearted segment, the problem of dumpster diving behind Colorado’s now legal marijuana shops.
Looking much younger than his years, Farrow was carefully aimed at a post-boomer mentality. He joked about watching reruns of news greats (Murrow and Cronkite), referred to marijuana as “weed,” referenced both Lena Dunham and selfies. At times painfully earnest, he introduced a new interactive feature called “The Daily Battle” by calling on viewers to tweet their thoughts about who was handling the Ukraine crisis better, #RFDObama or #RFDPutin.
What Farrow didn’t do was mention in any way, shape or form his personal life. That included the portions of it that have been part of a huge and emotional reaction to his sister Dylan’s recent insistence that Allen molested her. It also included the ongoing question of his own parentage (according to his mother, Frank Sinatra may have been involved).
Like Morgan, or for that matter, Alec Baldwin, who was recently relieved of hosting duty by MSNBC, Farrow views the world from a narrative platform. Leaning more perhaps toward the book-learned Rachel Maddow than Chris Hayes, Farrow — the Rhodes Scholar who graduated college at age 15 — fits in nicely with MSNBC’s ongoing attempt to make smart the new hip. (Political analyst Joy Reid also debuted her new show on Monday afternoon.)
But still it is him, his take, his performance that will make or break the show. Will more people want to see Ronan Farrow daily than wanted to see Piers Morgan live?
The timing of his show’s debut has already been commented on in light of his family’s public crisis, but with Morgan’s departure, it becomes even more meaningful. More than three decades younger than the Brit, born to fame rather than cultivating it, much more interested in appearing smart than right, Farrow could make his mark as an anti-Piers.
Though one suspects that with his international pedigree, Farrow might just be in the habit of calling soccer “football” too.
AFP Photo/Ben Gabbe
My absolute favorite tabloid newspaper headline ever appeared in something called the Weekly World News: “3-Breasted Gal Joins Clinton as His New Intern.” I still have a copy somewhere. Supposedly, the former president hired the “three-bosomed bombshell” after Hillary got caught cuddling with a space alien.
Alas, the more colorful supermarket tabloids are on the way out, victims of the Internet age, along with theoretically more serious publications like Vanity Fair and TheNew York Times. Titillating gossip about the sexual sins of movie stars, TV celebrities, athletes and politicians has been replaced by impassioned brawls about their moral fitness on social media.
Woody Allen, genius or pervert? Mia Farrow, mother of the century or virago? Dylan Farrow, victim then or victim now? And by whom? Almost everybody’s got an opinion, and it says here that nobody knows what they’re talking about. Sometimes it appears that the hardest words in the English language must be “I don’t know.”
Slate’s legal affairs correspondent Dahlia Lithwick put it best: “in the Court of Public Opinion there are no rules of evidence, no burdens of proof, no cross-examinations, and no standards of admissibility. There are no questions and also no answers….[it’s] what we used to call villagers with flaming torches. It has no rules, no arbiter, no mechanism at all for separating truth from lies.”
Journalism 101: Anybody can say anything about anybody else. That doesn’t mean it belongs in TheNew York Times. I question the professional ethics of Nicholas Kristof’s using his column to intervene in a friend’s brutal family dispute where he admittedly has no idea what happened. It’s a 20-year-old charge that was investigated and dropped. There’s no new evidence. The statute of limitations has run out. Other than revenge, what’s the point?
It’s an online rite of Dionysian celebrity sacrifice; a 21st-century pagan ritual, although not without its entertainment value. Previous to the Internet, who’d have known how many seers, augurs, necromancers and mind-readers live among us? Innocent or guilty? Let’s get out the Ouija board, throw the I-Ching, and fetch the dunking stool from the barn. Bind the witch and throw him in the pond. If he floats, we’ll hang him.
Comment lines can be amazing. Show me an entry beginning “As a board certified child psychiatrist,” and it’s 20 to 1 what’s coming: a few hundred words of factually-challenged speculation followed by an online diagnosis and a guilty verdict. Have Woody Allen’s films featured “a steady theme of a male protagonists finding love with a younger woman?” (Unlike, of course, Clint Eastwood’s.)
Very well then, he must be a pedophile.
News flash, frigid gentlewomen of the jury: ALL straight men find 19 year-old women desirable. They just don’t want to make fools of themselves.
I once knew a business tycoon in his fifties who dated a teenager. What on earth did they talk about, asked an incredulous friend?
“High school football,” he said.
None of which makes it OK to run off with your lover’s adopted daughter at any age. Out in the boondocks where I live, people get shot for that stuff.
In the abstract, there’s undeniable truth on both sides. The sexual victimization of children is far more common than many wish to believe, and victims are too often silenced. However, purely false or imaginary abuse charges have become the tactical nuclear weapons of divorce and custody fights everywhere. If Mia Farrow expected to win new converts, she should have left out the bit about Frank Sinatra fathering Woody Allen’s legal son—the one he’s been paying child support to all along.
Floated in Vanity Fair, the story generated headlines, but not credibility. And no, that’s not “mansplaining,” “slut-shaming,” or any of the other cant terms used to silence skeptics. Even in the Court of Public Opinion, it’s inadvisable to admit falsifying something so elemental. Could Farrow really imagine that would lend support to her allegations against the creep?
Or would it merely strengthen the conclusions of the investigators at the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital? “Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family,” or “that [she] was coached or influenced by her mother.”
“Disturbed family” is putting it gently. I wouldn’t let those two adopt a kitten. To me, the most affecting part of the whole thing was Kristof’s description of the now 28-year-old woman “curled up in a ball on her bed, crying hysterically” when she heard of Woody Allen being given a Golden Globe award. Somebody should give her Elizabeth Smart’s terrific book on healing from sexual trauma. Whatever happened to Dylan at age 7, obsessive dwelling on it has done her incalculable harm.
Meanwhile, regardless of good intentions, we feuding voyeurs and sadists are only making everything worse.
Photo: edavidove via Flickr
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