things i found in my phone

yes

even without the context of the rest of the chapter, this passage essentially sums up at least half of my many experiences visiting and fleeing LA to get back to oakland lol

Recently I have been rewatching some of Woody Allen’s stuff, most of which I had not seen in some time. If nothing else, I remembered liking LOVE AND DEATH and BLUE JASMINE. But after rewatching ANNIE HALL for the first time in like a decade . . . I gotta say, I completely agree with everything my hero Orson Welles once said about the guy:

ORSON WELLES: I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

HENRY JAGLOM: I’ve never understood why. Have you met him?

ORSON WELLES: Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.

HENRY JAGLOM: He’s not arrogant; he’s shy.

ORSON WELLES: He is arrogant! Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It’s people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world—a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.

Allegations aside, I too have this sort of primordial revulsion to him physically, and I can’t stand the way he talks and carries himself. It is true that there is a mock-bashful arrogance to him as Orson pointed out. And without even particularly looking for it, I couldn’t help but notice that there are a fair amount of jokes (?) involving children and I know you know what I’m talking about.

My friend Jess put it best in her review of HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, which is actually a pretty good movie:

Yeah, how about that!

It’s a shame because I’m all about a prolific director making low-budget films with their friends the way Bergman used to . . . films that feel like little paperback novels! And heaven help me, I love movies set in New York in the 70s / 80s. And I even like some of Woody Allen’s stuff. Dude is good at the thing he does. But whenever he’s on screen with his stupid little haircut and glasses, stuttering and stammering and dropping these snide little one-liners, my skin starts to crawl. The guy is a flat-out creep.

An aside: While we’re here, I may as well drop Orson’s thoughts on Ingmar Bergman:

ORSON WELLES: I don’t condemn that very northern, very Protestant world of artists like Bergman; it’s just not where I live. The Sweden I like to visit is a lot of fun. But Bergman’s Sweden always reminds me of something Henry James said about Ibsen’s Norway—that it was full of “the odor of spiritual paraffin.” How I sympathize with that! I share neither Bergman’s interests nor his obsessions.

For myself, unless a film is hallucinatory, unless it becomes that kind of an experience, it doesn’t come alive. I know that directors find serious and sensitive audiences for films where people sit around peeling potatoes in the peasant houses—but I can’t read that kind of novel either. Somebody has to be knocking at the door. I figure that is the way Shakespeare thought, so I can’t be in bad company!

(I love Ingmar Bergman, but he ain’t wrong here . . .)

ANYWAY

. . . that’s all I have to say about Woody.

Uh. Yikes!

Last weekend I was at my old friend Ryan’s house, and he and his wife and I made a fire and rewatched ALIEN, which I love, but which I had not seen in six or seven years. Man, it definitely rules a lot. Just a perfect little movie if you think about it . . . and it has a sort of timelessness to it as well. Plus, like BLADE RUNNER, all the sets and effects held up. It looks just as good now as it ever did.

Afterwards we were talking about the other ALIEN movies, most of which are not particularly good . . . but I remembered how much I had liked God Emperor Ridley Scott’s PROMETHEUS, which was a sort of prequel to ALIEN. When I first saw it in 2012, I thought it was really neat that it hides this from you for basically half the movie. It can stand on its own, even if you’d never even seen the original ALIEN, which is something only a dude like Ridley Scott would be brave enough to do.

Ryan asked if I’d watched ALIEN: COVENANT, which is its direct sequel, and I told him I had not. I somehow didn’t even know that Ridley had done it. The guy is always making stuff, after all. Ryan and his wife told me I should watch it, and when they mentioned that a snakeskin-hat-wearing Danny McBride had a part as a Slim Pickens-esque starcruiser pilot . . . well now I really had no choice.

Next day around sundown, I got gummed up on a gummy and made coffee and sat down to watch it. I refuse to review a movie on the internet, but HERE’S THE SKINNY: I really dug it. It is not quite as good as PROMETHEUS, but it’s also not the exact same thing again . . . it does some genuinely weird stuff. It’s basically just ALIEN: THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU and Fassbender is basically just Roy Batty from BLADE RUNNER. Wow! Fassbender, by the way, spins this movie around on his index finger like a basketball . . . he’s really good in it.

Also, I was so spooked up on the spooky stuff that I immediately saw that this scene . . .

. . . was a clever allusion to that painting ISLE OF THE DEAD / DIE TOTENINSEL (which, they say, could be found in every Berlin home):

Without spoiling anything, and I’m sure you could have guessed anyway, but his use of this painting is also quite a foreshadowing!!!

(Coincidentally, the very next day I happened upon a Reddit thread where someone was asking for examples of paintings influencing movies. I shared this and at least twenty-five souls were goodly enough to gesture: “Yeah, man.”)

Last year, in anticipation of his 94th birthday, I spent April and May watching pretty much everything Clint Eastwood had ever directed and / or starred in, most of which I had already seen, but some I had not (like BRONCO BILLY, which touched my heart). Now in 2025, I remain an unmarried and childless loser, so my next meaningless endeavor is to watch all of Ridley Scott’s stuff because the dude is just straight cool and makes cool stuff. He’s taken a crack at pretty much every genre, and even when he doesn’t necessarily bullseye the thing, there’s always something cool inside it. That is why he is one of the Old Masters.

This is from a 2017 interview with Ridley around the time Disney was making those new STAR WARS movies:

You’ve watched other people take over franchises you’ve made. How often are you asked to do that? Has Kathleen Kennedy offered you a Star Wars movie?

No, no. I’m too dangerous for that.

Why is that?

Because I know what I’m doing.

Nuked em. And later, after NAPOLEON (which rules!) was poorly received by THE FRENCH, ol Ridley struck again:

God, that rules. And I mean . . . he ain’t wrong!

SIR Ridley Scott’s first film was THE DUELLISTS, which came out in 1977. By then he was 40 years old and had previously only directed commercials. It is excellent and stars a young Harvey Keitel. It’s insane to me that the dude went on to direct BLADE RUNNER only five years later. Now Ridley’s nearly 90 fuckin years old and he’s still making like three movies a year seemingly effortlessly. I love this guy!

Let’s take a look at what I have left:

Oh man . . . I’ll tear through these before the first golden ray of springtime casts its heavenly glow upon Berlin’s cobblestone streets. I’ll be done with this in a WEEK!! This is also the very first time I am learning of the existence of WHITE SQUALL, which according to Letterboxd stars Jeff Bridges and can be summed up thusly:

In 1960, a hardy group of prep school students boards an old-fashioned sailing ship. With Capt. Christopher Sheldon at the helm, the oceangoing voyage is intended to teach the boys fortitude and discipline. But the youthful crew are about to get some unexpected instruction in survival when they get caught in the clutches of a white squall storm.

Sure, why not! The guy gave us KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, for God’s Sake. Although I’m sure it ain’t exactly Shakespeare, I for sure trust Rid at the helm of a boat drama period piece starring Jeff Bridges.

Anyway: Thanks for ALIEN: COVENANT, Ridley. I really enjoy watching something that is dumb while also being extremely smart, and is lit well and sounds good, which is precisely what it is. It’s a good time at the movies is what it is, and also just a flat-out good horror movie, and lord knows those are usually, as the fella said, sleeping pills that are dog turds at the same time.

I will conclude this post in which I lavished praise upon English director Sir Ridley Scott with a line from his own movie, which is also something I think we’ve all said to a Tinder date at least once:

When I was high school, I had a good friend named Kevin. Back then he was dating this girl named Kayla and he was totally in love with her . . . he even told me he wanted to eventually marry her. I liked her. She was always very kind to me. They were together for over a year and everything seemed all right. And then one day, apropos of nothing, she unceremoniously broke it off with him. Kevin was crestfallen. I’d never seen him so sad!

Kevin was friends with my dad and would sometimes turn to him for advice. Now he needed my dad’s sage-like wisdom more than ever before. He said, “Can you ask your dad if I can come over and talk to him about Kayla? I’m really having trouble moving on . . .”

I went to my dad and said as much. He was empathetic. He said: “Of course I’ll talk to Kevin. Bring him over.” And so I summoned Kevin.

I remember Kevin coming over one weekday night. My dad was down in the basement watching TV. Kevin sat down and told us the whole thing from beginning to end . . . and such was his love for this girl, and such was the grief he felt from her absence that he even began to tear up as he finished his tale. I know he was embarrassed about that, but my dad comforted him. At that point my dad was on his third marriage, so when he spoke of love and love lost, you knew he knew what he was talking about. But Kevin, who was all of 17 years old, still struggled to swallow any outcome where Kayla did not return to him. He kept saying, “Do you think she’ll change her mind? She has to, right?”

Finally my dad said: “Kevin, I like you a lot, and I can see you’re really hurting. I wish I could tell you that Kayla will eventually change her mind and want to be with you again, but the truth is that only Kayla knows what Kayla is going to do. So I’m going to give you some advice that I wish someone had given me when I was your age, which is this: Cut your penis off and you’ll be a millionaire by the time you’re 30.”