The Kind of Face You Hate

Hello Again

2024-12-30T15:56:00.005-05:00

Hey, everybody! I can't imagine anyone is still checking this blog, but just in case someone is I feel like it's about time I announced here that I have moved to Substack. My blog there is called A Rip in the Picture, and I suppose the reason I haven't promoted it here before today is because most of what I've posted there have been posts originally made here, and transferred to there for, presumably, a somewhat, or slightly, new audience. Which wouldn't, and shouldn't, interest anyone who used to come here.

But that's going to change come the new year, as I have an elaborate project planned. The details can be found in this post, but essentially I will be writing reviews, or just ruminations or whatever on every book I read in 2025 (and possibly beyond, we'll see how it goes). The specifics, again, can be found in that link.

Anyway, I hope you'll join me, if you even see this, and subscribe (for free or otherwise!). I'm excited, and a bit nervous, about this idea, but I'm plunging in with the full, fiery passion that bursts forth from my very soul. And I guess that's it for this place, which is a shame, because I really liked writing for this blog, but things change, as I believe somebody somewhere once said. I'll leave this site up, partly for the hell of it, partly to preserve what I wrote and didn't transport to Substack, and also, who knows, when the world collapses back into the Dark Ages, Blogger may turn out to be mankind's only salvation. I guess we'll see!

Thanks for visiting for so many years, and I hope to see you over there.

Carpenter

2022-01-18T16:46:00.002-05:00

Today for The Bulwark, I wrote about the great John Carpenter. Check 'er out!

Bogdanovich

2022-01-06T20:37:00.002-05:00

Today for The Bulwark I wrote about the late Peter Bogdanovich. RIP.

Ho Ho Ho

2021-12-26T16:14:00.002-05:00

I should have posted this at least two days ago, and doing so now seems almost perverse. Nevertheless, for The Bulwark I wrote about one of my favorite Christmas movies, Harold Ramis's The Ice Harvest. Check it out, can't you?

Aickman and Karloff

2021-10-29T12:45:00.001-04:00

This week, I have two new pieces up. For The Bulwark, I wrote about the greatest of all horror writers, Robert Aickman. And elsewhere...

...for Decider, I wrote about who I believe is the most important actor in the horror genre, Boris Karloff. I realize this isn't a new thought, but still, read it!

Two New Things!

2021-10-21T18:37:00.001-04:00

Today at The Bulwark, I wrote about the great Shirley Jackson, and it is a piece which in my opinion you should read.

But also...

...I recently spoke with Aaron and Carlee of the Hit Factory podcast about The Exorcist III, and the episode posted today. This episode is available only through their Patreon, but it's only five bucks to subscribe, and it's very much worth it, if I do say so myself. Check it out!

Val Lewton

2021-10-19T19:06:00.000-04:00

Today for RogerEbert.com, I wrote about the horror films of Val Lewton. I would like you to read it.

King

2021-10-14T17:48:00.003-04:00

Today at The Bulwark, I wrote about when I think Stephen King's writing is at its best. READ IT NOW!

Thomas Ligotti

2021-10-07T12:56:00.003-04:00

My new piece for The Bulwark is about the great horror writer Thomas Ligotti. Check it out.

Steve Martin and Chris Elliott

2021-09-27T18:48:00.001-04:00

Hello, I have a couple of new pieces up. One, at Decider, is about the great Adult Swim series Eagleheart...

and the other, for The Bulwark, is about Steve Martin, by way of his new TV show Only Murders in the Building. I demand that you read both.

Westlake

2021-09-13T09:40:00.004-04:00

I wrote a little bit about Donald E. Westlake for The Bulwark. Check it out, if you please.

Legion

2021-07-29T12:02:00.000-04:00

I wrote about The Exorcist III for The Bulwark. I would like for you to read it!

Ford

2021-07-13T11:17:00.004-04:00

Today for The Bulwark, I wrote about Harrison Ford's best (and maybe one or two less-than-best) non-blockbuster performances. Read it now! It's his birtdhay!

Uncle Harlan

2021-06-04T12:51:00.004-04:00

I'm extremely happy to report that my piece about Harlan Ellison is now live over at The Bulwark! Please check it out!

Aries

2021-05-09T10:52:00.003-04:00

Today I make my second appearance on Blake Howard's wonderful podcast about David Fincher's Zodiac. I am one of several guests, all of whom but me are great. Please listen!

Mirabile Dictu

2021-05-06T12:41:00.002-04:00

Another debut for me, professional writer! Today it's for Oscilloscope's Musings blog, where I "go long," as they say, on one of my favorite directors, William Friedkin. So read it! DO IT!

You Know I'm Not Big on Apologizing

2021-05-01T18:36:00.002-04:00

At some point in my relationship with Wes Anderson, his films, and his critics, I was moved to look up the word “twee,” that I might remind myself what, exactly, it means. This is the definition: affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint. The word is “chiefly British,” as well. Possibly more than any other word in the English language, “twee” has been applied, pejoratively, to the films of Wes Anderson by his many, and quite loud, detractors. Anderson’s films, they insist (usually just before a new one is about to come out, after months or years of simmering dormancy) are fussy, cute, visually over-designed, emotionless dollhouses that are exceedingly repetitive from one to the next, never serious, never about anything. This is all happening again in the lead-up to the release of The French Dispatch, Anderson’s latest, and, as with every past example, it’s a deeply frustrating thing to witness, because the perception of Anderson’s films, as they’re described by his critics, does not jibe in the least with what his films actually are, according to, I’m tempted to come right out and say, those who have actually watched the fucking things.

On the occasion of Anderson's birthday, I'm moved to revisit all of this. A year or so ago, this piece by Matthew Klee imploring Wes Anderson to “get a new gimmick,” kicked off another round of this silliness. Klee begins by praising Anderson’s first three films for being “sweet and prickly,” before going on to bemoan that 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a step back for being “aggressively twee” (there, you see?). So. Bottle Rocket — Anderson’s debut film from 1996 about a sweetly mentally unstable man (Luke Wilson) who takes straight-shooting advice from his pre-teen sister and gets involved in the heist of a bookstore with his goofily serious best friend Dignan (Owen Wilson) while also falling in love with a motel maid (Lumi Cavazos) — is “sweet and prickly,” while The Life Aquatic — which is about Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), a negligent, aggressive, mean, and very American version of Jacques Cousteau, setting out to avenge the violent death of his best friend Esteban (Seymour Cassell) during an attack by the elusive jaguar shark, a journey that will include Zissou pulling a gun on a pregnant woman, a pirate attack involving fatal neck wounds, tragic helicopter crashes, deep, endless grief, and bottomless regret — is the one that’s “aggressively twee.” Not Bottle Rocket.

What, exactly, is going on here?

Late in the article, after he accuses Wes Anderson of being from Texas, Klee writes this astonishing sentence: “It’s a schtick [sic] so severe, you won’t need to see his name at the end of a trailer for The French Dispatch to know he made it.” A film director having an instantly recognizable style is, evidently, a bad thing. Filmmaking, Klee implies, should be indistinct, unnoticeable, a matter simply of pointing the camera at actors speaking dialogue. The image within the frame should not be designed, or thought about in any way — to do so would be “fussy,” that terrible thing. Or, at minimum, if a director must have a style, he or she should, at least, change it up from film to film, creating a new personality every time so that, ideally, in the great mélange of cinema there will finally be no way of knowing who made what, save for IMDb. It is in this environment that a perfectly pleasant, entirely bland film such as The Big Sick becomes a Great Film.

And what, dare I ask, is this shtick that Anderson desperately needs to move on from? It can only be that dreaded style. Of course, it’s this that leads Anderson’s critics (or anyway, those who criticize in bad faith; surely there are some who can make intelligent points against these films) to act as though his career has been spent making the same film over and over again. On top of that, it can only be the surface of that aesthetic: Anderson’s penchant for inventing books for his characters to read (or to have written); to run wild with the set design; to write dialogue and narration that is almost hyper-literate (at least compared to most); to give his characters unique professions and hobbies, such as aquatic explorer and falconry. But to claim that the mountains of detail that can be found in each film all amount to the same thing, one mountain indistinguishable from the next, is to do nothing but reveal an inability to pay attention. The peak of this very specific kind of blindness can be found in an inexplicably popular Saturday Night Live sketch, which imagines what The Strangers would be like if it was directed by Wes Anderson, but only manages to show what such a sketch would be like if the person who wrote it had only seen The Royal Tenenbaums. One of the “jokes” is, quite literally “It’s Danny Glover!” as if Glover does nothing but appear in Anderson films, rather than just the one.

Which is another thing. In 2007, Anderson released what must count as his most controversial film, The Darjeeling Limited, about three brothers (played by Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, and Adrien Brody) on a trip through India following the death of their father. Upon its release, Jonah Weiner, writing for Slate, published an article detailing what he perceived as Anderson’s many racial sins. He gets things wrong almost immediately by describing the film’s Indian characters as “foils” to the white protagonists. However, since foils are meant to emphasize the qualities of other characters, and The Darjeeling Limited is a chronicle of the weaknesses shared by its three leads, I can’t quite see where Weiner is getting this from. But going after Anderson for supposedly problematic racial politics is a fairly popular pastime, and if you get him going both ways — “Cast more people of color in your films but under no circumstances make a film about them” — so much the better. By now, it’s taken as a given that Anderson’s 2018 animated film Isle of Dogs misused Japan and its culture, treating them as nothing more than shallow exotic spice, even though there is strong evidence that Anderson went to great lengths to be so specific about the country that Japanese audiences would likely get more out of the film than anyone.

Anyway, among the sins Weiner accuses Anderson of committing in The Darjeeling Limited is treating Rita, played by Amara Karan (curiously, Weiner chooses not to name any of the non-white actors in Anderson’s films when writing about their characters), the stewardess Jason Schwartzman’s Jack has an affair with on the titular train, as a “type,” a “mysterious dark-skinned beauty,” rather than as a person. He writes: “Jack hardly exchanges a word with her, but, reeling from a bad breakup, he begins pestering her to break up with her Sikh boyfriend [played by Waris Ahluwalia, incidentally], convinced for no good reason that she can turn his life around.” What Weiner crucially leaves out of this is that she actually does not do this, and by the end of their time together finds Jack to be foolish. Also ignored by Weiner is that “convinced for no good reason” is actually the whole idea. That’s not your thought; that was Anderson’s thought.

These sorts of critiques often have a smug, weirdly personal vibe to them that can be infuriating, but their most notable feature is their thoughtlessness (Weiner tosses off Owen Wilson’s 2007 suicide attempt as “his recent personal ordeal,” while discussing, it must be noted, the Wes Anderson film in which Wilson portrays a man who has recently survived a suicide attempt, a detail Weiner apparently found as insignificant as the names of the non-white actors). Former child actor and current writer Mara Wilson recently tweeted, “Every time I finish watching almost any Wes Anderson movie I feel like I just hung out with a very beautiful man for two hours: I enjoyed looking but retained nothing that was said or done,” suggesting that, for one thing, her memory problem was his fault, but also that there is nothing beyond the visuals worth remembering in a Wes Anderson picture. That The Grand Budapest Hotel, a film about the death of Europe at the hands of fascism and the inevitably of death and lost time, has nothing going on underneath the bright colors and precise framing. That Moonrise Kingdom, for all its heartfelt exploration of loneliness, marital strife, and the miracle of falling in love (constructed in a way to mirror the YA fiction favored by the young female protagonist), only has a few cute costumes going for it. That one of the most consistently surprising American filmmakers working today is good for nothing beyond his extraordinary visual imagination.

That’s all. How twee.

Al Pacino

2021-04-25T10:09:00.005-04:00

In 1992, Al Pacino, one of the most beloved and respected American actors of the 1970s and '80s, appeared in a film written by Bo Goldman and directed by Martin Brest called Scent of a Woman. In that film, Pacino, who would go on to win the Best Actor Oscar for this performance playing a retired Lieutenant Colonel named Frank Slade, makes this noise more than once: “Hoo-ah!” Those two syllables have been used to parody Al Pacino from Scent of a Woman until now to such an extent that anyone who hasn’t seen the film might believe that’s all he says during the course of its entire 156 minutes. In fact, it could be argued that since 1990’s The Godfather Part III, film critics, to some extent, and the film-going public almost completely, stopped taking Pacino seriously. There have certainly been films and performances that were embraced — as Vincent Hannah in Michael Mann’s Heat, Lefty Ruggiero in Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco and Lowell Bergman in The Insider, again for Mann, and most recently his remarkable turn as Jimmy Hoffa in Scorsese's The Irishman — but the popular perception of Al Pacino is that he’s a once-great actor who has either sold out or gone insane or given up nuance; whatever the case, he’s no longer any good. Or at best, he’s a formerly great actor who is now a silly goofball.

However, on the occasion of Al Pacino’s 81st birthday, I must insist that the truth is this: Since 1971, when he starred as a heroin addict in Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park, and right up until today, Al Pacino has never stopped being one of the greatest screen actors this country has ever produced. It’s worth mentioning that The Panic in Needle Park was Pacino’s second film appearance. The Godfather was his third.

My great frustration has been that those who slag Pacino seem to be aware of only a fraction of his recent work. So with that in mind, please allow me to recommend a few of his most underrated, or under-seen (likely both) Al Pacino performances, all of them post-Scent. And so, to begin!

Any Given Sunday (1999): I’m about to write the nicest thing I will ever write or say about Oliver Stone, and it is this: For this film (actually my favorite thing Stone has ever done) the director, who I believe has the worst taste of any major filmmaker, appears to have trusted Al Pacino to know what the hell he was doing and didn’t direct him into the ground. As pro football coach Tony D’Amato, Pacino looks and sounds every bit the weathered, passionate, cynical and exhausted man who senses that he is about to age out of the job he has dominated for decades. The big scene is, as you would imagine, a grandiose locker-room speech before the biggest game of the season. Admittedly, it doesn’t hurt that Stone wrote a pretty good speech, but watch how Pacino builds from a resigned world-weariness (the way he throws away “We’re in Hell, gentlemen,” making what would be an otherwise rather dramatic line sound like a verbal slump) into a genuinely inspiring roar. You can watch the speech here.

Chinese Coffee (2000): Most people don’t realize that Pacino has directed a handful of films. They are small, independent affairs, beginning with 1996’s Looking for Richard, a documentary about staging Richard III, and followed up four years later by this drama based on a play by Ira Lewis. It’s essentially a two-hander with Pacino starring opposite Jerry Orbach as a pair of terrifically unsuccessful writers. The two butt heads for 90-some minutes about debts, their poverty, their pasts, shared and otherwise, their love affairs and their writing. As a director, Pacino adds a few too many unnecessary flourishes, but his performance is excellent (as is Orbach’s). The film climaxes with its best scene when Orbach confesses to Pacino that, despite what he said earlier in the film, he did in fact read the manuscript for Pacino’s new novel, and he hated it. A lot unfolds from there, but what’s most striking for me is how Pacino plays his side of it, at times patiently defending his book, at other times becoming angry, but never slipping into the expected arrogance that would have turned the scene into a lazy “how interesting that they’re both wrong” ambiguity that is much easier to do, and I suspect, easier to act. You can watch most of that scene here, or you can just go here and watch the whole thing.

Merchant of Venice (2004): Perhaps the most towering performance Pacino has given in the past 20 years. Michael Radford’s divisive adaptation of Shakespeare’s most controversial play features Pacino as Shylock, the Jewish merchant and villain of the piece, who both embodies certain anti-Semitic stereotypes while raging powerfully against anti-Semitism. It’s always a shock to remember this is considered one of Shakespeare’s comedies, especially judging from this movie, which dampens all the comedic scenes as a way of amping up Pacino’s furious performance. Click over here to see Pacino’s take on the “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech.

Phil Spector (2013): David Mamet’s 2013 HBO film posits the theory that Phil Spector did not in fact murder Lana Clarkson, the crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to 19 years to life in prison in 2009, but rather it was a freak accident. To be blunt, and despite my deep admiration for the work of Mamet, I think this is complete horseshit. But Phil Spector isn’t the only film to feature a central moral idea with which I have disagreed and still managed to enjoy, so I’m not too worked up about that. And either way, the whole film could be trash and Pacino’s raving mania as Spector would still come off as a crazy kind of genius. How appropriate. He plays Spector as insane when we first see him and then slowly disintegrates from there. Here’s a sample.

Manglehorn (2014): This is possibly my favorite film on the list. David Gordon Green’s modest comedy-drama stars Pacino as a quiet, lonely, cat-loving locksmith who wants to pull himself out of his solitary rut. As basic as that sounds, the film has a strange, almost ethereal quality to it (driven home most directly by the last shot). It’s a wonderful mix of unexpected humor and a character study of a man on the brink of a personal apocalypse (“I’m losing hope in tomorrow”). This scene (with Pacino playing opposite Harmony Korine, of all people) should give you a good idea of the tone of the thing. But best of all, as always, is Pacino. As you can see from that clip, however bizarre and unexpected the humor is, it’s mostly happening around Pacino, who just sits there, making keys and fixing locks and taking care of his sick cat. For anyone obsessed with the idea that all Pacino knows how to do anymore is yell, maybe Manglehorn will finally shut them up. And also, there’s a simple little scene between Pacino and his cat that is one of the truest and most honestly happy moments I’ve seen in ages.

So there you have it. Al Pacino has been making movies for 50 years, and despite what some people would have you believe, he has been turning in brilliant performances for just as long (this, by the way, is to say nothing of his equally long and distinguished stage career). He has not stopped. He has changed, perhaps, but who would wish him to do otherwise? And if you don’t believe me that Al Pacino is just as good as he ever was — that he is, in fact, our greatest living American actor — then check out the above films. All of them are easy to get your hands, or anyway your eyes, on (even Chinese Coffee, which Pacino himself wouldn’t release for seven years after it played festivals). There are other good ones, too, such as Danny Collins, and even interesting misfires like The Local Stigmatic (I myself am undecided about how successful or unsuccessful it is, but you can check it out for yourself here). It’s almost all worthwhile, on some level.

All of which is to say: If your first thought when considering Pacino’s work from the mid-'90s to now is “Hoo-ah!” you should try to branch out a little. He’s not the problem. You might be.

(Incidentally, he’s also quite good in Scent of a Woman.)

Paul Bunyan

2021-04-23T10:25:00.001-04:00

I have a new piece about Fargo up at The Bulwark today. Click here to enjoy!

Timpano

2021-04-09T09:31:00.004-04:00

Hello, folks! Today I proudly make my debut at RogerEbert.com with a piece celebrating the 25th anniversary of Stanley Tucci's Big Night. Click and read!

Willeford

2021-03-27T11:45:00.003-04:00

I have a new piece up at The Bulwark about one of my favorite writers, Charles Willeford. Please click here and give it a read.

Devastaytio'n

2021-03-18T12:44:00.009-04:00

My band Devastayt'd has a new EP, which includes our newest single "Witch's Beer," please click the link to buy and Spread the Devastayt'ion!!!

Also if you want our LP, THIS FILTHY EARTH, we have a lot of CDs left -- a surprising number, I would argue, we toured and everything -- so just go to the website and use the coupon code IMDEVASTAYTD to get 87% off both.GET DEVASTAYT'D!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pisces

2021-01-16T15:45:00.001-05:00

Hello folks. Hey, if you'd like to hear my shitty voice through your computer's speakers, or the speakers of your hand-held device, then please click over to Blake Howard's One Heat Minute podcast site, specifically to the page devoted to "Zodiac Chronicle", his new 24-part series on David Fincher's 2007 masterpiece Zodiac. In the new episode, I and many more qualified guests talk about the early parts of the film, with the Lake Berryessa murder taking center stage. And you know what, I might appear on future episodes as well! But even if I don't, you should listen to each and every episode, because Blake and his guests know what's what.

The Collective Failure is Complete: The Books of 2020

2020-12-31T17:08:00.002-05:00

Hi! What a great year it's been, for literally everybody! So here we go again, my list of the best books I read over the last twelve months. The body of the post highlights my favorites (in no particular order, except for the last few, which are my extra-special favorites), and after that is the complete list. As ever, just because I didn't highlight it, that doesn't mean I didn't like it. It's just that one must draw the line somewhere. Onward!

The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout - Only my second Nero Wolfe mystery, but surely not my last. The most purely entertaining novel I read all year.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi - A strange, complex novel that is at once about what it seems to be about, but also a look at daily life in modern Baghdad (marred by occasionally clumsy translation).

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen - Wrote about it here.

Doting by Henry Green - Not one likable character, which is perfectly all right. Repetitive, which is the idea.

McCabe by Edmund Naughton - Basis for the Altman film, good enough that I bought two other obscure Edmund Naughton novels.

Last Days by Brian Evenson - About a sort of dismemberment cult. A cerebral, queasy, a horror novel for our times.

Eltonsbrody by Edgar Mittelholzer - This pioneer (so I'm told) of West Indian literature also dabbled in horror fiction. This one's very much imperfect, but the horror itself is both blood-curdling and cruel.

Platform by Michel Houellebecq - This novel about terrorism and sex tourism doesn't give a fuck to a quite extraordinary degree.

Deception by Philip Roth - A sort of meta-novel about a man and a woman, told entirely through dialogue. It's maybe no surprise that my favorite parts were when Roth takes a flamethrower to certain political hypocrisies.

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes - Novel, history, memoir of grief, all in one slim volume. One of the most terrifying books I've ever read.

Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes - Maybe the best in the series since The Real Cool Killers, although I got the order mixed up and accidentally skipped The Heat's On. So grain of salt, etc.

Fullalove by Gordon Burn - One of the most savage novels I've ever encountered, so bleak that I almost wish I'd never read it. It makes tabloid journalism seem kind of sleazy, actually.

Amongst Women by John McGahern - Sad in a way that made me want only happiness for everybody, including the person who caused the most unhappiness.

Revival by Stephen King - As black as Pet Sematary, horror in its purest form. Bleak. I mean, bleak. One of his best.

The Changeling by Joy Williams - One of the strangest, eeriest novels I've read, primal and insane, exuberantly sad, chilling and free.

Watson's Apology by Beryl Bainbridge - A novel based on the true-life murder of a woman by her husband in Victorian London. Almost queasily empathetic.

A Mother's Kisses by Bruce Jay Friedman - A quite funny novel about a kid in New York, his loony parents, summer camp, and the like. I really should read more books like this.

Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas by Glenn Kenny - Rich, encyclopedic, funny, unique. It made me want to immediately rewatch a film I've seen dozens of times. Now do Casino.

The Player by Michael Tolkin - Speaking of novels that are the basis for Robert Altman films, this one is sharper, more disturbing, and better than that movie.

Can't and Won't by Lydia Davis - Lots of stories featuring seafood. Good ones, too. One story, not one of the seafood ones, made me cry. Maybe two other books have done that to me in my entire life.

Love by Roddy Doyle - I absolutely raced through this. One of the best novels about the titular emotion I've read. And just when I thought he'd gone as far he could go with his premise but with too much book left, Doyle writes an ending for the ages.

Antkind by Charlie Kaufman - Gloriously funny, completely devastating. A great novel.

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe - Wrote about it here.

Assumption by Percival Everett - This compelling, bleak crime novel ends on such a note of strange horror that I had to think back on the small strangenesses i'd noticed earlier in the book and wonder "what have I been reading?" Unforgettable.

Inside Story by Martin Amis - One of Amis's great books, up there with London Fields and Money and Time's Arrow and The Zone of Interest, this strange, intimate epic is part novel (but which parts?) and part memoir (but which parts?), focusing on his relationships with Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, and Christopher Hitchens, and the deaths of each of them. I don't want to talk about it anymore.

McCabe by Edmund Naughton
Platform by Michel Houellebecq
The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
Doppelgänger by Dasa Drndic
Sphere by Michael Crichton
Bereavements by Richard Lortz
Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
Learning to Swim by Graham Swift
The Gallery by John Horne Burns
The Breakout by Donald E. Westlake
The Falconer by Alice Thompson
Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
Doting by Henry Green
Curious Toys by Elizabeth Hand
Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart
Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen
Last Days by Brian Evenson
Deception by Philip Roth
The Getaway by Jim Thompson
Small Crimes by Dave Zeltserman
Here We Are by Graham Swift
Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist
Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes
Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns
Shirley by Susan Scarf Merrell
The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout
Eltonsbrody by Edgar Mittelholzer
A Mother's Kisses by Bruce Jay Friedman
Assumption by Percival Everett
The Animal Factory by Edward Bunker
A Night at the Movies by Robert Coover
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings by Iain Sinclair
The Chain by Adrian McKinty
After Claude by Iris Owens
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Foe by Iain Reid
Weather by Jenny Offill
Lanny by Max Porter
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Antkind by Charlie Kaufman
God Save the Child by Robert B. Parker
A Diet of Treacle by Lawrence Block

Can't and Won't by Lydia Davis

The Player by Michael Tolkin

Kiss of the Wolf by Jim Shepard

Cows by Matthew Stokoe

The Changeling by Joy Williams

The Giant Rat of Sumatra by Richard L. Boyer

Revival by Stephen King

Made in Miami by Charles Willeford

Nobody Runs Forever by Donald E. Westlake

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Ask the Parrot by Donald E. Westlake

Watson's Apology by Beryl Bainbridge

Tales of Muffled Oars by Magnus Mills

Dirty Money by Donald E. Westlake

The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

Amongst Women by John McGahern

The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry

Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas by Glenn Kenny

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

Erasure by Percival Everett

My Work is Not Yet Done by Thomas Ligotti

Love by Roddy Doyle

The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin

Fullalove by Gordon Burn

The Silence by Don DeLillo

Inside Story by Martin Amis

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Mr. Paradise by Elmore Leonard

The Dead Look On by Gerald Kersh

The Last by Hanna Jameson

Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

Ending Up With What You See

2020-11-19T20:44:00.005-05:00

About halfway through his new autobiography Apropos of Nothing, Woody Allen makes a reference to the scandal involving him, his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow, Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, now married to Allen, and Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Allen and Farrow. Farrow, during their vitriolic split and custody battle, accused Allen of sexually molesting Dylan when she was 7 years old. After bringing it up, he says parenthetically: “(And I hope it’s not the reason you bought the book).” Speaking for myself, as a fan of the films of Woody Allen since I was a kid, I can say that it’s certainly not the only reason I bought the book, but let’s be honest here. The Woody Allen scandal, and specifically the molestation accusation, has defined Allen’s life and career for most people more than any of his films currently do. The number of people who would still publicly count themselves as Woody Allen fans has dwindled — if everybody else takes his guilt as a given, who needs the hassle? Indeed, the book was originally supposed to be published in March by Grand Central Publishing, until there were protests by employees of Hachette Book Group, who own Grand Central, that same month, leading Hachette to cancel it. But less than a month later, the book was picked up by Arcade Publishing and was finally published on March 23. And while the scandal does take up a large chunk of its latter half, there is a whole lot more going on here.

This is an odd book. Making the reasonable decision to begin at the beginning, describing his parents’ lives before his birth and then chronicling his childhood — which he at different times describes as “perfect” and “beautiful,” making it all the more perplexing to him that he should be so grim, pessimistic and misanthropic, even at a young age — as a good athlete obsessed with magic, New Orleans jazz, movies, comedy and crime (when he was a young man, his dad witnessed a mob hit, and Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York was Allen’s favorite book as a kid), Allen then spends most of the book jumping around in time like someone who is constantly being distracted by his own speeding trains of thought. For example, on page 122, Allen mentions Jean Doumanian, his best friend for many years and, with her boyfriend, the financial backer of many of his films, before they had a devastating falling-out about money. Allen writes, “I will tell the story of me and Jean as I go along, and it is a strange one." Then, starting just six pages later, he suddenly tells the whole story. Whatever happened to “as I go along”? Doumanian is rarely mentioned over the course of the subsequent 260 pages, except when Allen and she were together at some event or on a trip. Frankly, I find this aspect of Apropos of Nothing charming, and even fun. It certainly keeps the book from falling into tedium borne out of a strict adherence to chronology. In any case, my guess is that because Allen has always had complete control of his films, he demanded, and got, the same for this book. I wonder if an editor did anything more than accept Allen’s manuscript, read it and then hand it back to him.

Apropos of Nothing is always very funny, as you might expect. In the fascinating Woody Allen on Woody Allen, a series of interviews conducted by Stig Björkman, I remember Allen dismissing any compliment regarding his comedic gifts by saying it always came easy to him. In Apropos of Nothing, he doubles down on that assertion (which seems indisputable). After sending in jokes to New York society columnists and getting published, he was hired as a gag writer for unfunny celebrities: “And so, I went to work five days a week and knocked out about 50 gags a day. It sounds like a feat but if you can do it, it’s no big deal. The subway ride was about 35 minutes, during which I wrote about 20 gags. The rest in the office.” A nice gig, if you’re good at it.

Allen rarely praises his own talent, except when it comes to comedy. He thinks, or proclaims to think, almost nothing of his abilities as a filmmaker, but almost seems unable to avoid the fact that he was born funny and is happy to point out how rare this is (among others, he praises Diane Keaton, Elaine May and his sometime collaborator Marshall Brickman as “authentically funny”). He rarely has anything good to say about his talents as a director, to such a relentless extent that the reader might wish he would give it a rest (I did). While talking to him about Allen recently, my friend Glenn Kenny described this facet of Allen’s personality as “self-serving self-effacement,” which strikes me as exactly right. There comes a point when it’s hard to believe he’s being sincere. This, I imagine, is one of the reasons so many people have objected to the book, although it would take at most a distant second place to Allen’s insistence on describing every woman he ever met as “sexy,” or words to that effect. It’s constant, and depending on your threshold, eventually sort of off-putting (though it’s hard to imagine thinking this is the worst offense described in the book). The truth is, there is a disingenuousness to Apropos of Nothing (very late in the book, Allen describes his lifestyle as “middle class,” a description about which I am dubious), but when the reader, meaning me, reaches the long section about the custody battles with Mia Farrow and the accusation of child molestation, one might begin to understand why Allen is desperate to present himself as a regular, every-day guy. Maureen Callahan, in her barely-a-review, called the book “bitter.” You don’t say.

How to approach this? For this bit, it’s hard to know, without sounding less like a critic and more like an advocate. But as Woody Allen might say, at various points in and throughout this part of Apropos of Nothing, see what you think: After months and months of investigation following Mia Farrow’s original accusation, both New York State Child Welfare and the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic at the Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut not only cleared Allen of any wrongdoing, but also determined that no sexual abuse had been perpetrated against Dylan Farrow. This is public record, and in the book, Allen — inexplicably “bitter” according to some — quotes from these reports extensively. He provides much more evidence, including first-person testimonies from both Soon-Yi Previn and Moses Farrow regarding how the Mia Farrow household operated (Soon-Yi says that, among other abuses, Mia Farrow hit her in the head with a phone), as well as housekeepers and nannies.

(One of the many things that can be added to this is the fact that Andre Previn's ex-wife Dory, a singer-songwriter, once wrote a song called "Daddy in the Attic," the lyrics of which describe a situation that somewhat resembles the story Mia Farrow has pitched all these years. The song was released in 1970, the year Andre Previn's marriage to Dory ended, and his marriage to Mia Farrow began.)

Nevertheless, Apropos of Nothing had to be canceled by Hachette for giving voice to a sexual predator.

Following this section, Allen, rather awkwardly, rewinds in order to briefly describe all of the films he made from Husbands and Wives to A Rainy Day in New York (still not distributed in the United States because of the second wave of awareness of the scandal that came following the #MeToo movement). This is probably the least illuminating part of the book, because he blows through most movies at a rapid pace, boringly complimenting everyone he worked with; though he takes some time to cock a snoot at the actors he worked with during this period who later disowned him. He writes of Timothée Chalamet, who acted in A Rainy Day in New York:

Timothée afterward publicly stated he regretted working with me and was giving the money to charity, but he swore to my sister he needed to do that as he was up for an Oscar for Call Me by Your Name, and he and his agent felt he had a better chance of winning if he denounced me, so he did. Anyhow, I didn’t regret working with him, and I’m not giving any of my money back.

I find this funny, and fair, but it will earn him no new supporters (nor will the sentence “I liked Alan Dershowitz”). But Allen says throughout this section that during the whole time of the original tabloid explosion, he expected common sense to take over. Now that it hasn’t, he believes this book will make no difference whatsoever. The reaction to Apropos of Nothing so far bears this out. And it’s not as though I think Allen escapes the book unscathed: His rebuttal to Mariel Hemingway’s account that he left her family’s home early after he had been invited for the weekend because she, age 18, refused to travel with him to Paris strikes me as not exactly believable. (He claims he couldn’t stand sharing a bathroom with her father and so booked an earlier flight.) And he’s especially weird about his second wife, Louise Lasser, who suffered from bipolar disorder, and whose sexually euphoric highs he writes about as though they were just fun sexy games, rather than part of her illness.

In short, Woody Allen is, from what I can tell, more messed up than he thinks. But being an asshole isn’t the same thing as being a monster.