And now, the worst...

THE BAD SEED (1956)



So, a few years back, my lovely Polish bride was in a production of the theatrical version of The Bad Seed, where bratty little hellspawn Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack) gets away with a whole lot of evil behavior, including (gasp!) matricide, simply because the gullible adults in the story (much like the gullible adults of today) are unwilling to see children -- especially cute little white children -- as anything but perfect little angels.  But in the Hays Code ‘50s, villains simply HAD to be punished, at least in the movies, leading to one of the most ludicrous finales in cinematic history, whereby the bad seed gets her comeuppance Old Testament style with a good ol’ bolt from the blue courtesy of God (or possibly Zeus) Himself...followed by a dorky curtain call (complete with a comical “spanking” for McCormack) to reassure skittish audiences that, hey, folks!  It’s just a movie!  See?  Everybody’s alive and well and no evil will ever befall you if you stay on the right side of the tracks with all the decent, well-dressed, respectable Christian people...honest! (AO)

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One reason Woody Allen drives critics crazy these days – aside from his increasingly flaccid self-parodies posing as new movies, of course – is that there’s nothing they can do to hurt him. One of the recurring character types in his “serious” efforts is the guy who gets away with murder, never to receive his comeuppance. Clearly a lot of people think Allen is that guy. It’s not so much that he survived the whole Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi contretemps; in Allen’s case, he keeps getting away with making movies that are murder to sit through.

The British papers are particularly harsh in this assessment, probably because the critically excoriated Cassandra’s Dream is just now reaching London theaters. Interviewing Allen for The Times, James Mottrom comes off as a man beating his heat against a brick wall.

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So, for those of you who haven’t received your Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Preview yet (or read the news previously at Screengrab), hold onto your freakin’ hats: Woody Allen is filming a new movie in New York City with...deep breath...Larry David!!!

So, yes, despite Scoop and Melinda and Melinda and Hollywood Ending (and, uh, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Small Time Crooks and Celebrity and...well, you get the idea), I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope against hope that America’s favorite bald fuck has the power to resurrect Mr. Konigsberg’s erstwhile comedy mojo.

Oh...and the hot, spicy Johannson-Cruz-Bardem threeway?

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Two of the major film comedians of recent decades have started launching multiple assaults onto bookstore shelves. Woody Allen, of course, stop being a "mere" comedian a long time ago; he also started hemorrhaging audience shares a long time ago, and Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Movie-making, a redundantly subtitled collection of interviews conducted with his biographer Eric Lax, is designed to serve as a reminder that he is a major filmmaker, in case any of the people who've stopped seeing his movies have forgotten it. Much of what he has to say about the path he's taken as a director and his on-again, off-again relationship with his fans will be very familiar to anyone who's had moments of being interested lo these many years. Allen likes to affect a mandarin pose; the official story is that he stopped reading his reviews after Annie Hall, a film whose "classic" status apparently strikes him as inexplicable. But the 1980 Stardust Memories, a self-victimization orgy (and a work that Allen regards as among his very favorites) that includes a fantasy scene of extraterrestrials telling Allen that they prefer his "earlier, funnier" films, sure does look like it was made by someone who'd made a close study of the reviews of Interiors. Lax may be too deferential for the job; the book would be a livelier read if some of it had been done with an interlocutor who might have reacted to Allen's wondering aloud why Hollywood Ending "was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy" by explaining, "Because it sucked donkeys, my liege."

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