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We felt the same way when we saw it.
About Eschacon08 the manwhocreatedmoseswine writes:
I wonder what the Eschaton crowd would think of Hillary consorting with Richard Mellon Scaife, who seems to be playing namby-pamby with Clinton. My poor head is spinning here. I can’t keep up with all this. I think I’m going to go call Woody Allen and see if he remembers my mantra.
Well it’s been seventeen years since Scenes From A Mall so I suppose that Woody Allen has forgiven Roger by now. Let us consult The Book of Ebert:
Where it leads them, alas, is into a fog of arbitrary storytelling and desperate gimmicks, sudden revelations and unmotivated mood swings, in a movie that seems to have been written without having been thought about very much. The screenplay – by Roger L. Simon, with Mazursky – creates big gestures for its characters because it doesn’t know them well enough to give them small gestures.
What happens is, midway during a day that seems destined to be happy, the husband confesses he’s been having an affair. This revelation inspires a series of arbitrary responses in Midler – calm, outrage, grief, rage, analysis, acceptance, a decision for divorce, a willingness to compromise – after which she tells him she’s been having an affair, too, and the whole merry-go-round starts again. OK.
[...]
How could "Scenes from a Mall" have been repaired? Only at the screenplay level, before filming began. Allen and Midler struggle heroically with their characters, but there is nothing in this story for us to believe. Every moment feels arbitrary. Nothing flows from genuine human feelings. The mime mimics and mocks the characters, but in the strongly negative feelings he inspires, perhaps he also mocks the hopes of the filmmakers, by dramatizing in a visible way how much the film has been tricked up with gimmicks to disguise the absence of real care for real characters.
So… how long are restraining orders good for?
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Can’t he write one of his little “poems” about this? I know I’d just love to find out what Viola Liuzzo thinks.
The ‘net is all too full of jabbering Wingnut jerks, but they all pale in comparison to this douchebag.
:wave:
wonder what the Eschaton crowd would think of Hillary consorting with Richard Mellon Scaife…
As one of the ‘crowd’, I could tell you stories….. But then, of course….
Dunno why the ‘crowd’ should be such a focus of arrant wingnuttery.
Dunno why the ‘crowd’ should be such a focus of arrant wingnuttery.
TheManWhoCreatedMosesWine was a “Dinner Party on the way to Damascus” style revelatory wingnut convert, so from his perspective the ‘crowd’ was the one he might have considered himself a part of if The Day Changed Everything never happened (whether the Eschaton ‘crowd’ would have wanted anything to do with him is another question entirely).
I do not doubt that it is with sadness more than anger that he looks upon those of his former kind who, unlike him, do not piss their pants at the thought of the swarming musselmen hordes. It’s tough being a man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.
I like that movie. It’s got some really good things in it.
Since PajamaCon has never really gotten off the ground, and the “Hey, I’m the guy who created Moses Wine” is only good for a reply along the lines of “Is that cheaper than Thunderbird?”, Roger has to name-drop to make himself feel better.
To use a phrase more kindly remembered than any of Roger’s works…I pity the fool.
If only one of Simon’s commenters could suddenly produce Woody Allen, who would say something like “I heard what you were saying. You, you know nothing of my work. How you ever got to drop my name is totally amazing.”
Poor thing…reading his comments suggests he is disliked by his minions as much as by the warlike liberals. I’m sharpening a stick and going after him.
Except the “I forgot my mantra” line is from Annie Hall.
A “writer” who resorts to the “knickers in a twist” metaphor is the laziest of hacks.