I read Cohen’s article and when I got to that point, I laughed my balls off.

mother-sister-mother-sister style

Hey TBogg, is this some lotus-land or post-1982 cultural reference? Or was it in Chinatown itself?

/cluelessnes, I hope…

There is a nit I must pick with you. Cohen bears resemblance to a demented, chinless beaver much more than he does to an Ewok.

It is from the movie in which Faye Dunaway’s character admits that she has had a daughter by her father. She is hysterical and Jack Nicholson is slapping her to get a straight answer and each time he slaps her she identifies her relationship to the girl alternately as mother/sister/mother/sister.

The line that caught my eye is where Cohen refers to the drugged rape of a 13 year old as a “seduction.” There is a special place in hell with Cohen’s name on it.

Learned a lot from his experience with Devon Spurgeon, didn’t he? KKKreepy old fart.

Shit, that’s like an infected zit complaining that Jessica Beil isn’t really that pretty.

Boy that Cohen is multi-talented. He is an expert in torture, comedy and now, big league screenwriting.

Robert Towne did win a few awards for that script, BTW.

I mean really. I’m trying to laugh it off, but Jesus H. Fuck. Cohen, who is even a worse writer than thinker — and he’s a terrible fucking thinker — is pompous enough to toss off the opinion that Chinatown had a muddled script?

Cohen can muddle a point halfway between thinking it and writing it and he thinks, oh, you know what I can say about Polanski’s movie? His best one had script issues! Cohen has an anti-ear, a natural opposite talent which is prized by insecure bosses everywhere — sub-mediocrity that is as un-threatening to the people above him in the newsroom as it is completely disposable to the people who would bother reading his shit. No one’s had an epiphany after reading Cohen (at least in a good way), no one’s ever been won over by his brilliance or geometric logic. He exists as cover to his bosses and other nominal “liberals” who have no real convictions or innate intelligence but are easily swayed by stultifying conventional wisdom or chickenshit warmongering.

Naturally the script in question is funny, clever, insanely smart and just genius-level prose. It contains everything that Cohen is not. And a witless hack like Cohen, whose only memorable contribution to the world came when he decided to take on Stephen Colbert for not being funny enough, decides to go there? Do these people even have an ounce of self-awareness?

No.

This has been another edition of …..

Congrats. You are now eligible to become a leader of the DemocratIC Party.

Cohen’s continued appearance in print is proof positive that Fred Hiatt is able to close his eyes and pretend that it’s Angelina Jolie who’s giving him the blow job.

OT – Via Instaputz, Katie Couric leaves Glenn Beck dazed and stammering with a dazzling display of her Perky-Fu, simply by passing along an inquiry from a viewer to GB: What do you mean by “white culture?”

Video link (3:11).

I suspect Cohen smeared “Chinatown” because it’s the kind of comment that allows one to be considered ‘intellectual’ in Washington, DC. Pity the nation upon whom Cohen is foisted as a serious thinker.

The corpse of Katherine Graham is spinning in her grave fast enough to power Northern Virginia with electricity at this point, I’m figuring.

If the Washington Post had any self-respect (it doesn’t), they’d have fired Cohen before posting this column.

Maybe next he’ll be really edgy and write about how overrated Hamlet is, what with all that yakking. Needs to be tightened up. Maybe Roger Simon could doctor it or something.

Geometric logic? Only Captain Queeg gets to use “geometric logic”. Now that was a good screenplay.

Clearly, Chinatown was too complex for him. Or maybe he slept through the screening because he’s got lupus or a thyroid condition and instead of realizing he’s sick he blames Polanski. Because he’s not only sick but stupid. Also. Or maybe he’s just stupid. Yeah, that’s probably it.

I think it may been the whole anti-semitic/pro noir subtext that put him off.
Jake Gittes: Do you accept people of the Jewish persuasion?
Mr. Palmer: I’m sorry, we do not.
Jake Gittes: Don’t apologize – neither does Dad.

YAY ME!
Ummm, what again?!

My aunt felt the same way about “Chinatown”, because she could not believe that that nice Noah Cross fellow would ever have raped his own daughter.

Forget it, TBogg. It’s the Washington Post.

Perfect.

sister-daughter-sister

Wasn’t Richard Cohen guilty of sexual harassment? It’s not in the same league, of course, but I don’t think he has the moral standing to judge Polanksi – even in Cohen wasn’t one of the crappiest thinkers and writers in the MSM.

His opinion of Chinatown just means, unsurprisingly, that film is yet another subject about which he knows fuck-all. (Polanksi actually pushed Towne to make some good changes, including ditching a subplot. Towne, who wasn’t thrilled, eventually acknowledged that Polanski helped improve the script.)

Also, points to Cliff105 and JayBrida.

It’s late and I’d rather be bringing teh funny, but… Jeebus Christ on football skates… Robert Towne’s embarrassingly “muddled screenplay” won the Oscar, the BAFTA, the Golden Globe, the Writer’s Guild of America Award, and the Poe Award. Of course if Richard Cohen had a thing or two to say about it… well… He’d a told ‘em back in nineteen dickety-five, and he’d a done so with an onion tied to his belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn’t get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…

Yep, Richard Cohen has a past in such matters (as you say, nothing even approaching the scale of what Polanski has already copped to). He would do himself – and everyone else – a favor by not even addressing matters of sexual impropriety, regardless of scale.

In fact, better that he goes away entirely. He’s about as much of a “liberal” commentator as Howard Kurtz is a media “critic”.

Maybe you should pay fucking attention to the film next time.

Whew. Thanks, Teddy Partridge. For a moment I thought I had gone mad, I tell you.

captphealy–Tell your aunt it wasn’t rape. (GITTES: He raped you? EVELYN (shakes head no).)

I don’t understand all the furor over Cohen. “Some people are capable of *anything*…”

Statutory rape cannot be vitiated with consent, so rape it was.

it won the oscar for Best Muddled Screenplay in 1975

Thanks, Dr.

And a witless hack like Cohen, whose only memorable contribution to the world came when he decided to take on Stephen Colbert for not being funny enough, decides to go there?

Now, now, let’s be fair: Cohen did also give us the immortal “only a fool or a Frenchman” line, describing those who still harbored doubts about the Iraq invasion after Colin Powell’s “slam dunk” at the UN.

The fact that it is immortal only for its stupidity and condescension? Well, as I used to say when I was working as a programmer, “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

A) Foreigners
B) Who come from foreign countries
C) Something to do with the Jews.

Wait. Now they don’t want the ferriners to be slaughtered by Chicago’s savage negros? I’m confused.

Thanks!

The script wasn’t “muddled”. It was effing brilliant. However, there was a big dustup about the ending (Polanski’s idea?), with Towne threatening to remove his name from the flick (but he relented, obviously). I’m with Towne. The idea that a beat cop could shoot a 45 snub-nose police special and hit a moving target in the back of the head (Faye Dunaway driving away really fast) from 100 yards is beyond even science fiction. There hasn’t been a bigger deus ex machina since Aristophanes. Total cop-out.

BTW, was there ever a bigger shithead move than Polanski playing the part of the knife-wielding nose-slitter after his wife was murdered by the knife-wielding shitheaded Manson family? When I saw that in the theater I could not believe it.

Well, it’s been a while and no replies so, No Prize Tonight! The correct answer is, Yes, a bigger shithead move was raping a 13 year old girl.

Thanks for playing!

I think Cohen belongs with the rest of the Bozoz on the bus.