Movie break: Only for true fans of Woody: Melinda and Melinda (2005)

In a sub-series: Backtracking thru the Woodland

Tenth in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop (and political) culture

Also fits this series:

“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
 

Topical note: For several years now (starting with Whatever Works [2009]), Woody Allen’s American film distributor has been Sony, much in the news lately; specifically for him, Sony Pictures Classics.

 

Subsections below:

A divided story is heralded with a café debate
Pluses and (more frequent) minuses
Is the larger theme a nonstarter, or the ultimate result a dud?
A flawed film as a harbinger of unexpected success
 

Melinda and Melinda is not something I’d recommend to most viewers of Woody Allen films. If in his late period (post-2000) he sometimes echoes early, great works of his—Anything Else (2003) flatulently reproducing aspects of Annie Hall (1977); You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) roughly analogous to Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)—then Melinda seems to echo Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) in its alternating serious and comedic treatments, and raising the question (here, so self-consciously), Which artistic form captures life better?

If so, the “homage” to the earlier film is almost an insult, because Melinda and Melinda is crude enough and, as a whole, un-gripping enough that it very much makes us ask why Allen even made it, while Crimes is one of his truly greats, even winning awards in 2010 approaching 20 years after its release. But there are aspects of Melinda that reward attention or make a basis for further consideration, as I’ll show.

 

A divided story is heralded with a café debate

When the basic theme/structure of Melinda (after initial titles underscored by abruptly segueing from classical music to the familiar Duke Ellington work “Take the ‘A’ Train”) is laid out by a rather academic discussion at the familiar Allenesque setting of a Manhattan café table, you figure Allen had better have an interesting unfolding story, or pair of stories, ahead.

Alas, the first talker to deliver a keynote remark, a comic playwright (apparently named Sy) played by Wallace Shawn—a frequent participant in Allen films all the way back to Manhattan (1979) and in the recently-before The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)—here makes you feel that, in some general, long-term way, Shawn is a sort of Bilbo Baggins (or Yoda) of Allen’s world. He’s a lovable oddly-round-headed sort—his face looks like that of the Cabbage Patch doll no one wanted—with that jaunty, kindly-humored academic’s way of explicating an idea that reminds us of the patient high school debating teacher he played in Clueless (1995).

In Melinda, Sy makes his well-turned case for comedy being the best way to capture life (the argument he makes, at first, is subtle enough—as is a bit of the argument of his debating opponent—that it seems both antagonists are arguing, for a time, for each other’s preferred dramatic mode). “Tragedy confronts; comedy escapes,” or close to this, Sy argues; the point is boiled-down enough that it seems as if Allen is in third-rate high school teacher mode, not someone who can really turn out exquisite drama. (As it turns out, Shawn/Sy’s jovial delivery, only a couple minutes of film time [he turns up at film’s end, too], is one of the most-instant-jolt-of-fun things in the entire film.)

His debating antagonist, Max, played by Larry Pine, is a hangdog-looking sort standing up for the primacy of tragedy. Brooke Smith is on hand as another “county to hear from” at the table, as is another male. The two debating playwrights then will capitalize on a sort of case-in-point—a story, presented by the third male at the table (whose story is not unfolded from his mouth; the scene dissolves away after he starts), of a woman who turns up at a dinner party and seems in desperate need of a haven while…. Then, to prove their points about comedy and tragedy, Max the tragedian will tell a story (adapting the real-life anecdote) illustrating that her situation is best treated by tragedy; Sy will do his part regarding comedy.

If this sounds rather tedious, or high school–ish, the initial debate actually is unfolded pretty economically.

Incidentally, within this film’s structure, there is a bit of a philosophic problem that Allen doesn’t squarely address. For instance, I wondered whether the “real-life” woman arriving at the dinner party is meant to have actually had an experience approximating either or both of the stories the two men tell. Anyway, what the film delivers, in quite partitioned a fashion, is supposed to flesh out whether or not each artistic approach is adequate.

But as it turns out, we have no way of knowing whether either is, because we never hear the “objective” story. So, we don’t even know for sure if either, both, or neither artistic approach is fairer to the simple facts. And we don’t know for sure whether the point is that either approach captures the emotional and “sense-of-life” nuances better. (All of which may be part of Allen’s point.) In fact, the two stories diverge on broadly presented facts to a large extent (which may argue to how artists always exercise license), while Allen does tickle us with some droll “little” facts being vaguely common to both stories, such as some passing issues about “single-malt Scotch” (more on this sort of thing later).

After a while of watching the film, what we do find is that the serious drama is more interesting, which of course makes sense, given Allen’s increasing interest in his late years in doing better at serious works. He even states in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007), within pp. 56-58, that with Melinda, his heart was in the serious story, leaving him later with feeling the film should only have embodied that.

The question with Melinda then is, is it worth our while to see the two stories? Will we get something out of them, aside from pondering (which many viewers really won’t) the drily academic question of whether comedy or tragedy is the form of art more adequate to representing life?

 

Pluses and (more frequent) minuses

You do get some positives, as seems to occur even with the most abysmal of Allen’s late films. With all the money (even if a very few million) spent on an individual film of his, something good manages to—if I might mix metaphors—squeeze up through the floorboards of a turkey. (By the way, enabling Melinda, Allen had gotten a distribution deal with Fox Searchlight, a rarity for him; he remarks in Lax, p. 56, that a studio head, however interested the exec was in working with him, was put off by Allen’s exercising here his typical method of not showing a full script prior to the project being greenlighted. According to the Wikipedia article on the film, after an initial release in the U.S. in March 2005 at one New York theater, which brought in X amount of money, Melinda got a very limited release in other theaters, and then brought in very little money [per theater]. It apparently didn’t go to wide release in the U.S. It seems to have made most of its money overseas.)

The photography is nice, quite elegant—by Vilmos Zsigmond, who works with Allen on other films, to very good effect. And some of the aspects here of intelligent people milling in an upscale apartment, talking like current-day yuppies, wine glass in hand, and/or negotiating with tough incidents in life (i.e., in the serious story; e.g., mental breakdown, etc.), is refreshing when we know so many U.S. films don’t do this (in an adult way) anymore.

But on first viewing, I found the stories somewhat confusing, though keeping them apart isn’t too hard (earlier on, the “needle-drop” underscore music gives cues as to when you’ve gone from serious to comic, and vice versa).

You find there are two sets of people: in the serious story, a couple, Laurel (Chloe Sevigny) and Lee (Jonny Lee Miller), an alcoholic actor having trouble getting a part. (His career troubles are handled in suitably rather-dour terms.) Melinda Robichaux (my phonetic spelling of a French-sounding surname) (Radha Mitchell, in one of the consistently good acting jobs here, in both roles), is in rather dire straits when she turns up at the couple’s dinner party, but seems generally composed. A man she, much later, ends up falling in love with is a pianist she meets at a party, Ellis (Chiwetel Ejiofor, a rare example of a Black actor in a fairly significant role in an Allen film; of course, he was starred in the much-acclaimed film of 2013, 12 Years a Slave). (Allen’s way of depicting developing love, occasionally tossed off so casually here [and in other films] that you forget he’s good at depicting this bright side of life amid all his vinegar, here comes with Laurel and Ellis playing different parts of a complex piano piece together. Something similar happens in the comic story between Melinda and a man she meets on the street.) Eventually, Laurel has an affair with Ellis, disturbing Melinda acutely, which sets up an apparent final showdown of sorts.

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In the comic story, the couple Melinda “barges in on” is Susan (Amanda Peet), a young film director (seeking to finance a new project), and Hobie (Will Ferrell), an actor temporarily out of work. Here, an affair that disrupts things for the comic-story trio (which echoes the serious story’s trio in only rough ways) happens between Susan (Peet) and another man, leaving Hobie (Ferrell) free to pursue a relationship with Melinda, though he is to be disappointed (temporarily) in this aim.

While the serious story is fairly interesting throughout (though it appears not to go terribly far, toward its end), the comic story struck me, on first viewing, as interesting mainly for Ferrell’s performance, where he plays a light-toned, slightly fey, antsy goofus-of-sorts who utters one-liners very much like Allen (who of course doesn’t appear in the film)—and doesn’t come across as corny for that; he is genuinely funny. But I found myself more often won over in tiny moments by the individual one-liners, while the larger comic story he was in rather left me cold (at least on first viewing). (Steve Carell even turns up in a scene or two as Hobie’s friend Walt.)

 

Is the larger theme a nonstarter, or the ultimate result a dud?

A bigger question raised here is, How gripping and clear is this film’s patching together of these two stories? Actually, the thing as a whole struck me as labored and pretentious on first viewing, but that was partly because I didn’t get all that was going on within the two stories. On second watching, I got definitely more of what was going on in both stories, but I think a second watch is much more than most viewers, even casual Allen fans, will want to do with this film. Suffice it to say that Allen’s grafting a tragic and a comic story together works very much better technically, to much better overall effect, in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Here, the method seems like just an excuse to make another film as money and the availability of recognizable actors allowed (at least on first viewing; further viewing may soften your assessment).

(I took a set of notes I had to reorganize, which I sometimes do when a film’s plot is complicated, or details first strike you as mixed in a kind of murk. One thing that helps you through this film is that, whenever you see a cut to Sevigny, which happens not rarely, you are [still] in the drama [and she is the kind of actress that just seems her own unique brand—not a sex kitten, not an idiot, not an Earth mother, not a certain kind of femme fatale…; but someone who, for one thing, seems like a quintessential denizen of Manhattan…].)

Another thing that typifies this film: certain little details “cross over” between the serious and comic stories—among them, a reference to “single-malt Scotch”; a motif of (the idea of act of) rubbing a genie’s lamp to get a wish; and a certain low-lit “bistro” in which two sets of people, one from each of the stories, have revelatory conversations at certain key points. This makes you wonder whether it’s important to note how these details occur in each story, but I think the more likely truth is that they are just arbitrarily shared by the stories, and Allen spread them out the way he did just to have fun for himself when concocting the stories.

That is, if they’re supposed to mean something thematically as shared by the stories, I think they’re really red herrings. But I’m not 100 percent sure of that, and the fact that you don’t know as you plod through the film a second time is one basis on which casual viewers would be left cold by this film. (From another angle, you can say Melinda is one of those Allen films that would make a better short story or novella than a film.)

Yet another interesting thing is that, within the drama, there are little comic bits, such as Melinda referring to a private investigator—his apparent real name—as “Woodcrutch.” And the comedy has little “tragic” bits such as, remarkable for a story that’s meant to be a comedy, when Melinda first arrives at the dinner party, her confessing—while stumbling along in a hall—to having taken an overdose of sleeping pills (and they obviously haven’t taken full effect yet). That is, the Melinda in both stories is a sad sort, or a woman at a sad pass in her life; but the fateful turns that will make up her story in the comedy lead her to a kind of happiness.

The comedy for Hobie (Ferrell) winds up at an asinine/dramatic turning point when a date, played by a heavier-looking-than-years-earlier Vinessa Shaw (who played the charming streetwalker in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut [1999]), ends up with her suddenly wanting to jump out an apartment-building window, in a fit of despair. This is Allen somewhat mocking his more serious moments.

Unfortunately, to add to the difficulties of viewing this film, the disk I had had skips on it in scene 21 (skips that my cleaning it with a tissue couldn’t correct), so in the drama’s last scene, I had no idea what happened after Melinda discovered Ellis with Laurel at his apartment. The story had to end in some distinctive way, but I don’t know how.

I have a lot more detailed notes on Melinda, which shows what a “work in progress” my trying to review it is. But handling it cursorily here seems best for now.

 

A flawed film as a harbinger of unexpected success

Overall, I was struck by how Melinda seemed, historically for Allen, a bridge between what came before (Anything Else) and what came after (Match Point [2005]). With Melinda, you have a nicely shot, a-bit-wandering tale of modern-day New York yuppies, Allen-style (as are included in Anything), and a strong itching on his part to release a serious story (as in Match Point).

You feel Melinda was, all the more, a cramped case of “warming up” for Allen when you realize that when he was freed, via help from production done in Great Britain, to do Match Point, that film “came off,” to use a frequent shop-talk phrase of his, considerably better than this one. And Match Point made a hell of a lot more money, freeing him (via studios’ being warmer to his newly proven ability to make a lucrative drama) to plan to do more serious dramas in the future, which he did, squeezing them out (in 2007 and 2013) between more crowd-pleasing fare.

Movie break: Beatles-in-Hamburg Woody: Bananas (1971)

In a sub-series: Backtracking thru the Woodland

Also, ninth in an occasional series, “Patchouli and B.O.” (a recollection of the ’70s)

Also fits this series:

“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films

[Edit 12/2/14. Edits 12/17/14.]
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Strangely, this film has a four-star rating in Leonard Maltin’s compendium, which I think reflects the agog esteem it was apt to be held in whenever (just after its release?) Maltin and/or his reviewers first assessed it, when it was more edgy and original-seeming. Today, this film looks (to me) pretty ramshackle and, while amusing, it seems even less worth viewing a second (or third) time than Allen’s first directorial effort, Take the Money and Run (1969). I would give Bananas no more than three stars.

It reflects a couple things of a technical nature, showing Allen’s growth as a filmmaker: first, it seems to have been culled from an enormous amount of shot footage, much of it done in Puerto Rico (the amount of pre-edited film was 240 reels, or 40 hours, according to Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen [Knopf, 2007], p. 270). This can suggest that there are a lot of little gems in the film, in that the more work is done (in terms of exposing film), the higher the likelihood there is good stuff to make up the final film.

It turns out, according to its editor Ralph Rosenblum, that while there was a lot to cut down—and Rosenblum felt that this film was his biggest editing task within his years working for Allen—the story basically was all skits, not an engrossing overarching story. Thus the editing trick was to assemble the skits in a way that made them work best. (Lax, p. 270.)

And this sums up the way the film seems: like a train of amusing skits, nothing more.

Allen’s persona as comic nebbish fully arrives; a tangled story allows antics

There’s also a sort of cheesy meanness to at least some of the humor. This was, like Take the Money, an Allen film that was like a story made up of standup bits; but while now the story doesn’t involve a criminal but what Allen would more or less patent as his version of an antihero/nebbish, this nebbish is still a rather unsympathetic character at various turns. And if it wasn’t for the fact that some of the humor still appeals after all these years, you could write this film off as a flimsy, faded product of its times, reflective of an early-’70s rebelliousness and occasional lapses into daring tastelessness, but (aside from being of “anthropological” value) not quite having enough relevant (or still-resonant) humor to outweigh the more dated aspects.

Which brings me to the second way it shows Allen growing as a filmmaker: this is in his performance as Fielding Mellish, a New York–area products tester who meets Nancy, a young activist (Louise Lasser) seeking his signature on a political petition; in her he forms a romantic interest. A bit later, after an intriguing, amusing, but slightly tedious (on second watching) breakoff conversation, she dumps him. In an increasingly whimsical story, Mellish rather desultorily goes to fictional San Marcos, a South American country for whose enlightened rebels Nancy had been getting signatures on a petition; the two of them were originally, in an access of political enthusiasm (in part), going to go there together.

Once he is there, Mellish gets mixed up with the government, run by a newly acceded dictator named Emilio Molina Vargas (Carlos Montalban, brother of actor Ricardo [I didn’t know that until doing this review], and portrayer of “El Exigente,” the character in the Savarin TV commercials in the 1960s and ’70s). There is also a rebel group, supposedly the good guys for whom Nancy in New York (and her presumed political group) provided grassroots (if token) American support. After being set up to take a fall for the dictator, Mellish is capture by the rebels, headed by one Esposito (Jacobo Morales, by today an esteemed Puerto Rican filmmaker) …and eventually Mellish gets made leader of San Marcos himself. And goes to the U.S. on the country’s behalf…and is captured by the FBI as a suspected subversive, etc.

Allen as Mellish really pours on the comic nebbish act. You can tell that Allen is now comfortable with being a distinctive kind of character on film; in Take the Money, he seemed to inhabit a role that he could do without the American audience necessarily accepting him yet as a certain kind of film actor; his thinking may have been, if they saw him as old standup Woody, good enough. Take the Money adequately met audience expectations for him as an actor/director that were still developing, with the film’s etched “portrait of the nebbish as a young yutz.”

Now in 1970-71, Allen seems to be aware he is a kind of “film character brand,” or at least he’s working hard to establish this. His performance in Bananas as a kind of “Ubernebbish” seems to take the persona that we, today, have long associated with him to a sort of extreme that, in retrospect, almost undercuts his intentions (i.e., goes into self-parody at times). This goes along with his now-frumpy longish hair (1970 style) and his adapting Bob Hope in that comic’s form of the wisecracking coward in a peripatetic romp through an unlikely situation. And the result in Allen’s hands in 1971 might be quite amusing to those who don’t quite know his work yet, but may seem slightly embarrassing to those well versed in his larger body of work with its mature efforts.

That is, people who grew up with Allen in the 1970s might have felt this was his first great film as a kind of fertile comic. To me today, knowing how he developed as a film writer and director, Bananas looks like a cheesy, flashy entertainment almost as dated as a manic also-ran installment of TV’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

Tidbits

* This film was cowritten by Allen and Mickey Rose, who also helped him with Take the Money. Jack Grossberg, associate producer on the earlier film, is full producer here. Marvin Hamlisch again provides a complementing music score.

* This was Allen’s first film with the distribution by the studio United Artists. UA would remain with him through 1980’s Stardust Memories.

* Sylvester Stallone appears as an extra in the sequence on the subway train—he is one of two punks who start assaulting an old woman with crutches. (Yes, that is one emblem of the 1970s—punks who committed petty crime on the streets, at least as seen in mass media, were just as often white as other races.)

* There is some ethnic or values-related humor in Bananas that some would regard as in not the best of taste today. At one point, Mellish says that if he had stayed in college—he says he was in the Black Studies program—he would be Black by now. This might have seemed a bit edgy and a little off-color at the time; to me today, it is not especially offensive, but I can see how a range of people of color today could be put off by it. (By the way, I am proud of my role in doing editorial work, as did many other northern New Jersey freelancers [as well as publisher staffers], on African American History: A Journey of Liberation, by Molefi Kete Asante, a textbook published by Peoples Publishing Group in 2001.)

* Roman Catholics can take umbrage today at something in Bananas, too (in his early films, Allen was big on what you might call “comparative-religion” humor that was allowable in the early 1970s, given the rampant “freethinking” modes of cultural attitudes and criticism of the time). Toward the film’s end, there is a mock TV commercial—the sort of thing Saturday Night Live would get big on—for fictional “New Testament” cigarettes. (Who remembers TV ads for cigarettes? I do, but rather vaguely.) Dan Frazer, an actor maybe most well known today for being on TV’s Kojak, here plays the streetwise priest recommending the cigarettes to a parishioner. (Frazer played a Freudian psychoanalyst in Take the Money.)

This film’s basic style has been much imitated since, probably to better effect—such as in Airplane! (1980).

Movie break: Beatles-in-Hamburg* Woody: Take the Money and Run (1969)

In a sub-series: Backtracking thru the Woodland

Also fits this series:

“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films

* “Beatles-in-Hamburg” as a modifier means early in the given artist’s career, when many of the elements of his/her work/art were already present, if in rudimentary form. See End note for more.

Subsections below:

Among staples, Jewish jokes and the pretty girlfriend/partner/wife
More Allenesque staples: Psychological/family background, and sex jokes
Appearances by longtime associates; production partners
Miscellaneous details or observations

[Edits 11/28/14. Edit 12/8/14.]

Take the Money and Run (1969) may be among the very few Woody Allen films that are most familiar to those only casually interested in or knowledgeable of him, along with the likes of Sleeper (1973) and Annie Hall (1977). It was the first film—and under what would become the long tradition of the Rollins/Joffe producing banner—that he both starred in and wrote-and-directed.

It also presents the gag-a-minute type of humor with which he became so tightly associated by the mid-1970s that, by Stardust Memories (1980), when this latter film was interpreted as being simply about him, its line about the fictional director’s “older, funnier” movies became among the received critical (and public) wisdom about Allen in the decades of his subsequent career. This implied he had been “at his best” or “at his most crowd-pleasing” when doing quickly-ratcheted-out comedy, as if he were the tasty novelty of a comedian doing a standup routine in writing movies, rather than the writer of probing themes that he gravitated toward and preferred to work as, starting in the 1980s.

Take the Money, actually, makes us appreciate, in his later films, how much a screenwriter of depth and subtlety Allen is at his best. Yet this film’s humor often still hits home today, and it’s surprising to note how much of the Allen that most generally expresses himself throughout his many films still comes through this early and admittedly homely, sometimes clunky work.

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The film is a mock documentary about the life of a small-time crook named Virgil Starkwell who rises from being an enormous bumbler (in trying to be streetwise and to pull off petty crimes in his youth), to eventually being successful enough as a bank robber that, near the film’s end, he gets 800 years in prison (which, the narrator [Jackson Beck; 1912-2004] intones, Virgil feels he can cut in half with good behavior).

Among staples, Jewish jokes and the pretty girlfriend/partner/wife

There are various Jewish jokes, a feature that at the time was on the edgy side, and in Allen’s case probably was seen as an inevitable consequence of Allen’s being a New York–tuned Jewish standup comic. Here, we find, for example,

* the squabbling, digression-making, Ashkezani-inflected parents (and, not a necessarily Jewish trait, in silly disguises), who are interviewed sporadically (though Virgil’s full name doesn’t really sound Jewish);

* the prison episode where, after volunteering to be a guinea pig on which an experimental vaccine is tried out, Virgil develops the side effect of turning temporarily into a rabbi (complete with black brimmed hat, bushy beard, and aptness to pedantically discourse on the meaning of eating matzoh during Passover); and

* a funny scene with Virgil in a prison chapel, obviously Christian (Catholic), with him being sneaked homemade weapons by an intended-breakout accomplice while they are in the pews, and (as intended cover, yet by an obvious fictional clod about observing religious proprieties) Virgil engaging incongruously in the type of rhythmic rocking that religious celebrants do in Jewish temples.

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There is also the Allenesque touch of having a girlfriend/wife for Allen’s character who, at least in the looks department, seems out of his league, which side character probably at this early stage of his career reflected merely the producer demand to have an attractive leading lady to add some romance and sex appeal to the story for marketing purposes (as any big-audience director’s debut would have been expected to do).

Here, the leading female is Janet Margolin (1943-93) as Louise, a young laundress Virgil stumbles on accidentally and almost immediately becomes smitten by. Virgil is about to snatch her purse in a town park when she alertly eyes him, and he catches himself, and then he moves discreetly/awkwardly to a friendly conversation about amateur artwork she is doing. They are an item from then on.

Margolin had her acting debut in the respectful mental-inpatient drama David and Lisa (1962), and worked for Allen again in Annie Hall, as the city-intelligentsia-conscious wife who apparently has trouble making love without Valium.

An interesting touch in Take the Money—whose setting is (largely) San Francisco—has Virgil and Louise going on a date to Ernie’s, the famous restaurant with the red walls that is reproduced in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). One amusing detail: notice how, when Allen’s Virgil drops a handful of change into the waiter’s hand as a tip, a woman to the left on the screen (an extra) is looking steadily (and a little scandalized?) at what has fallen on the floor, as if she didn’t expect this move.

More Allenesque staples: Psychological/family background, and sex jokes

In the film’s fastidious mock-biographical manner, family history is presented comically (Louise, it turns out, was adopted by a career-military father, who after 30 years “catapulted” to the rank of corporal, and a religious mother who had conversations with God about, among other things, interior decorating). Allen, of course, would prove for many years to be conscious of this robust way of looking at aspects of character; it would appear in many forms through many of his later films, not just in the similar Zelig (1983), but in ones where family background, whether or not including mental illness, is invoked importantly.

Even an early form of Allen’s patented sex jokes turns up. In a sort of monologue comprising his brief turn at voiceover narrating of his story (temporarily taking over from Beck—an artist’s-license move), shortly after meeting Louise, Virgil remarks about having talked with a prison psychiatrist about sex. The p-doc, following up on his question about whether Virgil had a girlfriend, had asked him if he thought sex is dirty, and Virgil recounts that he answered, “Well, it is if you’re doing it right.”

Appearances by longtime associates; production partners

At this early stage in his career—not that I know it all really well—Allen had help from people he’d already been working with, in lesser-film fare. Mickey Rose (1935-2013), a student-days friend, is his co-writing partner here, as he would be for Bananas (1971). Rose had helped him with the drive-in-style comic riot What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966).

Interestingly, Allen’s start here as writer/director/star almost didn’t happen; in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007; p. 335; speaking within November 2005-November 2006), Allen notes, “When I wrote Take the Money and Run with Mickey Rose, Jack Rollins [Allen’s longtime manager] didn’t want me to appear in and direct a film because he felt like there might be some kind of backlash, like, ‘Who is this wunderkind? Who does he think he is?’ And I didn’t care about directing it. I just didn’t want someone to ruin it. So it was hard to get anybody [a studio] interested in Take the Money and Run.” Palomar Pictures International ended up being the producing studio, and accepted the multi-role situation that Allen presented, presumably because, as Allen says, it “was a new company and they couldn’t deal from strength.”

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For Take the Money, Allen would have the services of several film editors, but Ralph Rosenblum (1925-95) is listed in the credits as a consultant: actually, he was brought in to perform crucial reworking of some of the film’s editing, giving it such tweaks as the interspersing of comments by Virgil’s parents; this is recounted in Lax, p. 270. Rosenblum would be ranked as the full editor for the next film. Rosenblum would work as sole/main editor for Allen up through Interiors, on every film Allen directed except Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex… (1972).

Also, Jack Grossberg is an associate producer here; he would be full producer on the next film, and would be associated with Allen’s work at least as late as, I think, Sleeper.

Marvin Hamlisch (1944-2012) scored music for virtually the entire film, as he would do for Bananas; this was not Allen’s usual method for his films from about Sleeper on.

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Louise Lasser, who was married to Allen for a few years until 1970, appears toward the end as a “person on the street” commenting about Virgil. (She would costar with Allen in Bananas and would also be in Everything You Always Wanted….) Lasser here is giving some streetwise comments, basically riffing on the notion that Virgil had seemed like (for one measure) such a schlemiel, and yet was a master criminal. She ends with an expression I think I have right: “Go know, right?”—which may have been hip in those days, but I’m not sure what it means unless it is “Go figure.”

The voices in the film are largely what sounds now like flat and rather expressionless blats; similar can be found in 1970s films. I guess we Americans got more inflection-wielding and with a certain general lilt in our talk while (perhaps as a semi-cause) society has gotten more technologically advanced, or whatever other societal correlate of the voice phenomenon may be relevant. Allen, however, is familiar to us with the Brooklyn touches to his voice. He even has thinning hair here, as he would familiarly have later: going bald on the back-top of his head, and receding front hairline, leading to his characteristic uneven front hairline, with its comb-over, or whatever that is.

Miscellaneous details or observations

* Allen originally had an ending far different from what the film has; it would have entailed a shootout, with Virgil killed messily, reminiscent of the end of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). But there would have been a comic twist, with Louise (and her son by Virgil) visiting his grave, and (as the two leave) Virgil from underground (?) giving them a “Psst!” as if he was still alive. The scene was filmed, and included even special effects for gunshot wounds, courtesy of A.D. Flowers, the famed special-effects man who later worked for Francis Ford Coppola, among others. But this ending was scrapped (see Lax, p. 134).

* Various story details seem to echo (by artifice, of course) Allen’s real life, such as the birth date of Virgil being Allen’s. There are also touches of Virgil being characterized as an “atheist” (including by his own father) and a “pinko”—similar is done regarding Allen’s character of Fielding Mellish in Bananas—which both reflects the cultural/populist bugbears of the time and perhaps echoes some features of Allen’s late-’60s/early-’70s intellectual orientation (arguable; or what may have been compatible with it) that maybe he was playing for laughs as well as being a bit daring about presenting.

There are also jokes in the later film about Mellish’s being a college dropout, which perhaps Allen was a bit embarrassed about his being then, and certainly wasn’t later. (The underscoring of anti-communist paranoia is also shown in the fictional FBI agent, Daniel Miller, toward the end of the film, who is noted as having authored a book, Mother Was a Red.)

But the classical instrument Virgil takes up as a youth, a cello, is an incongruously nerdy instrument for a street “gamin” like him; but it is not the clarinet that, in real life, Allen ended up mastering.

* The instrumental song (by Quincy Jones) “Soul Bossa Nova,” which is familiar to younger audiences through the Austin Powers series (1997-2002), underscores one sequence in this film, but it is played somewhat differently here.

End note.

The Beatles, as you know, did their most act-solidifying early work as a managed house band of sorts in a few clubs in Hamburg, Germany, from 1960 to 1962 (starting with the Indra Club and then the Kaiserkeller). Bob Spitz’s comprehensive if flawed and occasionally biased biography on the group from 2005 (Little, Brown) is arguably at its most interesting when it recounts, in surprising detail, the band’s early professional history that is similar to that of many a local American garage or bar band: young slobs pounding away at their act in obscure venues with dreams of the big time.

Also, the recent book Beatles  vs. Stones by John McMillian (Simon & Schuster, 2013), comparing The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, shows its obvious bias toward the latter group, but I think the question of which group was greater (in the 1960s) is both silly and easily answered: The Beatles were greater, if no other reason than because, by 1962, they had long paid their dues in grungy work for about two years as an apprentice band usually covering other writers’ songs, with occasional original numbers, which period of extended, rugged apprenticeship the Stones never went through. And of course, the Stones rode the tidal wave of British-band “mania” that the Beatles helmed that allowed the Stones to come to prominence.

In terms of the literal image that “Beatles-in-Hamburg” connotes, think of the band in stinky leather jackets in later 1960 (and consider the picture, from whenever, of John Lennon with a toilet seat around his neck). Think of them playing like maniacs in a seedy club patronized by boorish German sailors, the band fueled by the stimulant Preludin and beer, and heeding the exhortations of Bruno Koschmider, the German club owner/manager who told them to “Mach Schau!” (“Make show!”; this more literally can be read as something like "Power up a show!," but you get the drift; anyway, on this latter, see The Beatles’ autobiography from 2000 [Chronicle Books], p. 47, and Spitz, p. 209).

OFAD 7: Connecting with Lefty: Finally getting my Medicaid card, to square with the ACA demand

Mission accomplished, but for ACA cheerleaders, count me out of your short list (or your long list)

Guys don’t seem to be called “Lefty” anymore.

—George Carlin, in Napalm & Silly Putty (New York: Hyperion, 2001) (this is the sort of name my title refers to; I am not saying “Lefty” to make any insinuation about Obamacare being “leftist”; i.e., I figuratively mean Lefty as in a local shady operator like, as suppositional examples, Louie the Lip or Joey Ding-Dong)

Subsections below:

I. Wonders never cease: Getting answers on my ACA “oblivion” situation

II. Connecting with Lefty, so to speak

III. Maybe it ain’t over till the jackass-automaton Marketplace e-mailing genie sings further

[Edit 11/19/14. Edit 11/20/14.]

Some of this was written before the climactic mid-November stuff recounted below, and the rest is written before I have my Medicaid card in hand, so I’m hoping things pan out completely, so this story won’t be for naught.

Some of this experience involved trooping around “like a lay social worker” fairly similarly to how I’d done for others back in my VISTA days (1986-87) and, much later, amid busy help-to-others in a support-group milieu from about July 2001 to, say, 2006. Except now it was just for me, when the Great Leap Forward of the Affordable Care Act ostensibly seemed to be another big, beneficent, civic-oriented helping hand extended magnanimously by Washington but ended up seeming—because of the federal level’s occasional rattletrap nature (combined with state inadequacy)—to require local yokels to scrape around desultorily for (figuratively speaking) box-tops, rubber bands, and old lottery tickets in Palookaville.

By the way, in criticizing it, I don’t expect to be considered along the cartoonish, black-and-white lines by which pro- and anti-ACA thinking has been cast. For instance, I agree with those who dismiss the Republicans as having no improved (or any) alternative to the ACA. And personally I feel the Republican idea that, to get health insurance, all people need to do is get jobs is almost criminally wrong (as to facts and otherwise). But, even after having voted mainly Democratic for about 34 years, I would not cheerily wave the flags for the ACA, given all its many flaws, big and small. This after I was among those in the 1990s who was supportive in some sense of the Clinton attempt at such a program.

This narrative may seem to be a bit detailed, but it shows the hoops you have to go through, which I feel after all I’ve been through in my life comprise a fairly big impertinence. And I went through this without really being enthusiastic about doing so, and I also spare you the curse words and such that might have peppered this “walk through a shadowy land.”

I. Wonders never cease: Getting answers on my ACA “oblivion” situation

So I finally went out to the office in Sussex County, N.J., of NORWESCAP, which I had first heard about at a distance, completely new to it and wonder-minded at age ~25, in very late 1986 or early 1987, when I was working in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America, since ~1994 part of AmeriCorps; my stint was at a location in Somerset County, N.J.). This (in 2014) was where I thought I’d get answers on why—if I’d signed up via the federal “Marketplace” Web site in late 2013, and had gotten info on having an assigned policy number in winter 2014—I still had no Medicaid card by this month (November 2014) and had been informed via impersonal e-mail by the “Team” at the federal Marketplace that I had not finished signing up, etc.

(By the way, I had long ruled out phoning NJ FamilyCare again. After three tries in the winter, with just an inadequate mechanized response, and knowing they’d been overwhelmed with Medicaid-extension processing in the winter anyway, why expect to get anywhere lately with them?)

I’d heard (in a local newspaper, I think), probably in fall 2013, that in this county NORWESCAP was handling the administrative task of helping people get signed up for ACA insurance; NORWESCAP is a sort of charitable organization, mainly meant for low-income people in several counties in the state. I’d thought I would contact it (stop by, if I could) shortly after Election Day (as a matter of practical realities and slight lack of enthusiasm about this whole ACA “project”) and before the start of the new signup period, which I’d heard was to kick off about November 15 (which, of course, it has).

Also, it was to follow the fairly unitary-and-exclusive (emotionally and practically) period of hospital care for my mother, which ended in late October. She had a tumor successfully removed, in a same-day-surgery sort of situation (which resulted in a few days of inpatient stay for her). The tumor was a sarcoma (the third such she’s had; the first in 2001-02 and 2011), for those who’ve followed this thread in my stories. The doctors seem to see no reason to feel there are any malignant remainders of the tumor in her, though apparently she is going to have her periodic scans more frequently again.

On November 6, I was out in the county seat of Newton to renew my driver’s license. I wasn’t sanguine about how well that would go (I think, at age almost-53, I seem to have virtually lost all faith in government doing the simplest things), but it went much better than I’d expected. I felt that, once that was done, the rest of the day should be “mundane chores that I would semi-fondly embrace.”

It took some work to locate the NORWESCAP office. There was a lot of footwork, but I guess you could say I was determined. Slogging along with umbrella, I checked at the county administration building. Got a phone number there from some helpful-enough women in the County Clerk’s office, and some vague info on possible address. There was a reference by the women to NORWESCAP’s office being near the main library building. That place I knew well, having gone there a lot in years past. I went out to the library on this rainy day. I got in (construction there made for an awkward new temporary entrance), and finally got info from a helpful library reference-department worker on NORWESCAP’s address.

(You may wonder, why didn’t I look this up on the Web myself? I basically felt I’d locate NORWESCAP readily enough “on foot” as part of my going to Newton for my license renewal. [To kill two birds with one stone, in part.] Plus, I had a foggy memory of NORWESCAP having been in a building near the center of Newton that I used to stop at 12 or 14 years ago. In the old days, I used to tramp around to different social-service places in Newton [by car and/or on foot] when I was more up to my neck in the support-group jazz [through roughly 2006], and in those days I did a lot of literal footwork by preference. Almost as a practical echo, I felt doing my business in Newton this month on foot wasn’t too bad an idea. As it turned out, the address for NORWESCAP I got, on Halsey Road [in Frankford or Hampton township], could have been gotten online [assuming the Google info wasn’t outdated, which sometimes happens].)

Then I had a heck of a time finding the building they were in. I had a number for the street address, but the building—which also housed a business—was surprisingly hard to find. Once there, I found you had to ring a buzzer at NORWESCAP, and wait for an answer—you couldn’t just walk in.

Now the (to me) humor-appropriate stuff started. This was like ringing at a speakeasy. I stated my business and was buzzed in. A helpful woman talked to me; I gave her my “quick brief”—“I signed up last year, nothing in the mail, got a policy number, called NJ FamilyCare,” etc. (you might know the saga from my past OFAD entries), and she seemed to answer as if she’d heard roughly the same from others before. She was efficient in giving me terse info, including a flier giving info on whom to phone in Denville, N.J. (in Morris County; the actual location would appear to be different), who would be my next best bet.

(She said her office here handled just family something-or-other. She also made some reference to X program for people 55 and over, though she didn’t give me the relevant flier, as [she said] it was outdated. I guess I looked 55 or older. I certainly had looked like walking death when my new driver’s license photo was first taken.)

I said thanks, and was ready to go.

This was like getting a tip like, in growly voice, “Call dis number, ask for Lefty. He’ll hook you up wid your connection.” I mean, the woman was nice, but how rickety a system, in its national and local branches, this suggested for delivering nationally mandated health insurance. Not that the NORWESCAP people weren’t (in their locally responsible way) earnest in providing what they could.

Now, as it would turn out, there was more gritty tracking down of the right person, and getting the problem ironed out, for me to do.

II. Connecting with Lefty, so to speak

I called the number I was given, on a Friday, somewhat late in the day, November 7 (at some point I found the relevant NORWESCAP office was in Rockaway Township, N.J.), and I left a detailed-enough message. The next day (Saturday, November 8) I sent an e-mail after I’d looked up the NORWESCAP entity online, saw several addresses, and found that you could e-mail a message to the office of your choice. (I didn’t realize NORWESCAP had started as a poverty-addressing arm of Johnson’s Great Society program. The Great Society had long been, at least vaguely, a sort of solid-metes-and-bounds of U.S. government standard for me, though it has become as faded and decayed as a morning’s dream you can barely remember.) I composed a succinct-yet-thorough-enough e-mail and sent it.

On Monday, November 10, I found there was a phone message, left on one of my numbers, by the person who had received and/or chosen to answer the e-mail. She gave useful info. I transferred this to audiotape to listen to it again.

On Tuesday, November 11, I called the number that it seemed I should first call, but I got a lot of ringing, no answer. Sensibly, one could conclude the office was closed for Veterans Day, but I didn’t know for sure if I was calling a state office or not. (Turned out, I was.)

On the morning of Wednesday, November 12, I called the number again, and now I got a live person, no mechanized system. (I would find, only for sure via a piece of mail I received within days, that this was a Medicaid office in Paterson. Not only had it not occurred to me to try, out of the blue and instead of NORWESCAP, to call the state Medicaid office directly, but I didn’t even know there was one in Paterson.)

I explained my situation: I’d applied on the federal Web site, had gotten nothing (in the mail…), and had found I had a policy number but got nothing else over months, etc.

I found from this person (she seemed to read rather perfunctorily, almost to herself, from what she found on her computer) that my policy had been effective X date last winter, and a card was mailed out to my street address (on Y date).

I never received it, I told her. (I probably explained that my street address could not be used to mail things.)

In fact, not that I would have explained this in detail to her, HERE (in the ACA techno-doings regarding what address they used) WAS ONE BIG SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM OF WHY I NEVER GOT MY CARD. And I will explain something here that may sound like grumbling about another weird set of ways of my household for decades, but here really isn’t meant to be.

(Sidebar—note on how I do a “slalom run” in talking about family issues. You see, I hold off on giving the full set of stories on household jazz that, variously in my practical life, throws me for a loop, in big ways and small, as much as I might seem [to you] to spill an awful lot of beans on my blogs. The way my family is, I still very discreetly hold off on telling some things and speaking about others. This may seem arbitrary to outsiders, and even does a bit to me at times, but I think it follows in a very good-faith manner [or as good-faith a “policy” as is possible under the circumstances] how I talk about family stuff, which latter is relevant enough to me as a writer [going back to the 1980s] but reaches points where “holds” on releasing info should be observed, for reasons I either explicitly offer or not.)

My household has not had a street address for mail, ever. We have had the same P.O. box since 1965 or 1966, even before there were (as a matter of instituted infrastructure here) any street boxes in the neighborhood (which started about the early 1970s). My mother has long stayed with the P.O. box, staunchly refusing to have a street box (even after numerous homes on our street, and throughout the local community of Barry Lakes, have had street boxes for years), for reasons I won’t go into now. This has led, over many years, to (before the Patriot Act) various people (in situations where their requiring address info is at play, when you fill out forms, or whatever) being surprised that we only have a P.O. box, and we say please use that, otherwise our mail can’t be delivered….

Post–Patriot Act, there have been more occasional rigorous demands from various entities for a street address along with a P.O. box, or else (either as might be more or less advised by those seeking the info, or as could be bemusedly suspected by us) we’d be suspected of conducting fraud or terrorism, etc. So we have new dances to do (I may be more adept at this than my mother, who is of course tooled to older conventions, etc.) in terms of supplying addresses so that if anything is to be mailed to us, it is sent to the P.O. box, even if this means filling out blanks (which doesn’t always work, e.g., technically on computers) with the street address and the P.O. box together.

Tedious? Well, a fact of my life.

(My mother’s refusal to have a street box, as is so often the nature of her “ways,” has both an objective, sensible component and a subjective, less-than-reasonable component. One of her longstanding rationales was that punk kids could steal from and/or do damage to the mailbox, and this as a broad matter was far more likely and relevant a concern in the 1970s, and has very rarely happened in decades since. But wouldn’t you know? In the way that if you harbor fears long enough, eventually your fear will have some basis [though I don’t think she focused on it this way], as recently as March 2011 there was a crazy situation where a kid living on our street had no fewer than five college-kid beer-and-drugs parties in one week, each on a different night, and on one night, there was a rampage of boys on the street where a neighbor’s mailbox was damaged, and a partier’s car had its mirrors smashed off and the driver was chased across several lots and in a panic away from the area. My mother, awoken from sleep, called the police, not fully cognizant of all the facts of this mayhem at the time. We haven’t seen that kind of punkish insanity in this neighborhood since the 1970s. Fortunately, the household from which it emanated hasn’t hosted that kind of stuff since.

Let me add, this mailing-address thing isn’t the worst disservice [summarily speaking] that my mother’s “preferences” have done me; there are other, far more troubling examples, which I decisively hold off on telling in my blogs. By the way, a recently released memoir by Brooke Shields, on which I saw something of a review in the November 18 Star-Ledger, is interesting, showing in a way that people are ready enough to accept when it comes from a star, and otherwise is a foreign country most people don’t know about or try to understand: when you as a child are [as one type of problem] “codependent” with a parent [not exactly the case of me with my mother, but more Shields’ case], or operate in a “parentified role” [more my case], you actually are always inhabiting two different roles, with their own spheres of moral guidelines and emotional concerns, and the disjunction of which spheres provides sources for deep conflict: one that is more ordinarily defined with respect to your parent [where, due to problems apart from the two-role situation, you may be oppressed or abused in some way]; and one outside your parent’s sphere of business and concerns, and “looking in,” which is more morally grounded but also is troubling for putting you, the child, at odds in key ways with the parent.)

##

And I found from a printout in my ACA files from when I first applied on the ACA Web site that they did have my P.O. box address—in fact, it was the only address that showed on the printout. But bless the “system’s” heart, between my applying and the feds getting the federal Marketplace-inserted info to the state to be processed there, somehow things got handled so that the mailing address used for the Medicaid card was the street address. And apparently the card was mailed out and returned to sender. And then ended up in Oblivion.

Well, the woman I talked with on November 12 was very helpful—she was (as I said) in a Medicaid office in Paterson. She first had to check with someone else if they could change the address per my request on the phone, or per whatever concern…and yes, they could. I should call back in 48 hours to confirm the change was made. Then I would get everything mailed to me.

I had a set of notes from various things the woman told me, a somewhat initially-incoherent-to-me jumble of stuff she mostly programmatically issued, and I sorted it out later, because there were two additional (and toll-free) numbers I had to call.

On Thursday, November 13, I got a mailing from the Paterson Medicaid office of just a single photocopied sheet basically outlining the type of benefits I would be entitled to. It was better than nothing, but only slightly. (It said I had to get most forms of health care from a certain HMO that was set up for Medicaid recipients in the area. This wasn’t entirely pleasing.)

Then on Friday, November 14, two days after the key Wednesday call, I phoned the number I first called, again. Yes, my address was changed. Now…I found that I should call only one of the two toll-free numbers I’d been given on Wednesday. This I did, and I went through whatever minor hoops I had to there, and was told my stuff would come in the mail in seven to ten business days. (Which I later found could be as late as early December.)

Well, this was something of a relief. I would have my Medicaid card almost a full year after I had first started applying. I wouldn’t have to go on the federal Marketplace site again (though I keep getting e-mails from the Team, as if they still “feel” I have to continue with an application that wasn’t finished last year).

I relate all this, not feeling it’s the worst anyone ever experienced with this ACA signup, and knowing there are many, many stories that are worse. But for what it’s worth, I feel a little more confidence in the system. But let’s just say that, if the ACA people were looking for a rank-and-file consumer to do cheerleading for the system, I would not be their first choice.

III. Maybe it ain’t over till the jackass-automaton Marketplace e-mailing genie sings further

On Tuesday, November 18, I opted—not with full confidence—to act on one of the many Marketplace e-mails I’ve gotten from the Team on the federal level, and reset my password for the federal site (though, except for maybe something routine I might be required to do, I don’t foresee any business with it, now that I seem to be signed up for Medicaid, while the Team keeps sending me e-mails as if I still have to sign up).

I ran into problems pretty early—when in the process of resetting my password, there were three questions related to my past personal life that I had to answer to clarify I was who I was. Well, I thought I had the answers to, but one answer turned out to be wrong. (Factually, I didn’t know why at first, then [after looking in my paper records] I found out: one of the questions concerned my “boss” from my first job. I had spelled his name wrong this time; in the original application, it was right. Both spellings have five letters and should be pronounced the same. So I had the name, not the right spelling.)

I tried to go through the process again, and starting encountering more problems. I did not get an e-mail, as I got when first being required to reset my password. I started getting infuriated similar to when I was deeply angered by the ACA e-mail implications several weeks ago, as shown in my entry OFAD #6. I figure, rather than curse the “whole shidden mess” out in the toughest possible terms, time to take a break.

I will keep you posted if there are more weird developments.

Off the Scales*: Does this real news story need a punchline?

From The Star-Ledger, January 31, 2009, p. 18 (no byline):
 

Court issues mixed ruling on mail-order lawsuit

A state appeals court yesterday upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a Bergen County man who claimed a mail-order product he purchased promising penis enlargement violates the state’s Consumer Fraud Act.

The three appellate judges agreed with a trial court judge who dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the man, Englewood attorney [name redacted], failed to prove he suffered any “ascertainable loss.”

But the appeals court said the trial court erred in dismissing the suit without allowing [attorney/plaintiff surname] to offer such proof in an amended filing.

[Attorney/plaintiff surname] filed the lawsuit, for which he sought class-action status, in November 2007, six days after ordering the product, Herculex, from the mail-order health food supplier, Hampshire Labs Inc. The appeals court decision noted [attorney/plaintiff surname] apparently filed his lawsuit based on the ingredients of the topical ointment with no indication that he ever tried the product.

[Attorney/plaintiff surname] said he intends to file an amended lawsuit.

[end of story]

##

Do we need a punchline?

A Google search does not show the attorney ever filed an amended complaint.

##

* “Off the Scales” is an occasional series, usually with entries appearing as “sidebar” features within larger entries on other topics, which I first announced within this entry, as Off the Scales: A comment series on excesses in the U.S. legal profession. This occasional series is not meant to imply that I am an attorney, which I am not; it is meant in part for entertainment and is dedicated to the proposition that “I don’t claim that any jackass can practice law, but that there are some things done within the legal-professional realm that even a jackass like me can do for himself, in pro se fashion.”

OFAD 6: Coming around the mountain when she comes

[That “mountain” headline above alludes to an old American folk song, which suggests simpler times than we have now, with the likes of the Affordable Care Act.]
 

I originally wrote this in the morning, when I was more upset about the e-mail I discuss here. Since then, midday, I have made a trip to the hospital that is part of the complex formerly known as the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) and now is part of the Rutgers University system. My mother has been there as an inpatient since being operated on two days ago (I alluded to this development partway into one of my “GWU Days: Alan L. …” entries posted earlier this week on my other blog). I am less upset by the e-mail but still not thrilled by it. To go to what I first wrote (updates are in brackets):

This morning I found an e-mail in my usual e-mail account (i.e., the one I use the most for communications with others) that was from (per the sender name line) “The HealthCare.gov Team.” The e-mail included the copy, “It looks like you submitted an application but did not complete your enrollment for Marketplace coverage. If you haven't been back to HealthCare.gov in a while, it's time to change that [sic]. Come back and apply for 2015 coverage *on or after November 15th*.”

I am busy this morning [this said before my trip to the hospital]. I am in the several-day process of dealing with my mother’s being at the hospital (the tumor in her chest was successfully removed two days ago; a full biopsy of it has not been done yet). This entails trips to the hospital, and phone-calling when needed, amid other minutiae. Basically, as the day goes on, I have to find out if she’s still in the recovery room, or whether she has been moved to a private room by now [yes, she has].

I say this to show, first, that I take involvement in the U.S. health-care system, in all its highly varied quality, very seriously; and second, I have business on the road I am attending to, and try to touch all my bases as I can, without getting too frazzled. As is the case with many of us.

So when I read the start of the e-mail just mentioned, while working on a library computer, my initial idea was to make an infuriated blog entry on it. I don’t usually do that. Though some of my blog entries seem to evince a lot of anger, they generally, per my long practice, are carefully tooled, with emotion rhetorically modulated as necessary. Even now I am doing this. For instance, you may not realize that I have held off the impulse to refer to the ACA or its “Team’s” item of business they sent me as “fucking shit.” Until now.

It’s news to me that I “did not complete [my] enrollment.” I don’t know what that means, in the context of reality. I signed up in December 2013, and tried to follow up in the winter, through early spring. Several phone calls I made to the state office of NJ FamilyCare, an entity handling the Medicaid-expansion side of the implementation of the ACA in the state, could not get me information on my account, though I could get a policy number. (I had to follow a mechanized system, with buttons pushed for options; I never spoke to an individual to get substantive info.) I gave up trying to call that office, figuring I would wait and see if that office, which had a horrendous backlog, would get to my policy in the fullness of time.

By the way, you can see my series tied to the ACA here, under the tag acronym “OFAD”:

An introductory note is included within here.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

Part 4 is here.

Part 5 is here.

##

Given the lack of any response (via mail or otherwise) from NJ FamilyCare, I had actually been planning, for weeks, to look into my predicament with some footwork. I was going to go to an office in the county seat of Newton, N.J., of a nonprofit organization called NORWESCAP, which was handling ACA business last fall. I wanted to see there what I should do next. If I had to reapply for Medicaid (via the federal Web site), I could do that. Meanwhile, if I have to pay $95 on my federal taxes for tax year 2014, in winter 2015, because the Medicaid application had not been duly processed by the state in 2014, I am prepared to do that.

Part of the problem I suspected as to why my application didn’t go through (I had hypothesized this was at the NJ FamilyCare level) had to do with the amount of income I put in my application last December, which was a rough estimate. Actually, by about early September this year, I made only a little over the estimate. Through now, I am over even that level, but it is still well below the amount limit for an individual to qualify under the Medicaid expansion.

When in the midst of my difficult ongoing situation regarding income, and dealing with my mother’s health issue, it annoys me no small amount that I get some computer-generated horseshit from “The HealthCare.gov Team,” especially when for MONTHS I figured that all I needed to do was wait for the state to get its act together.

If the contention that I had to complete applying means that I should have responded to the postcard CRAP I got in the mail last spring, some marketing-like SHIT that I covered in this springtime installment, I believe this can’t be right, because (1) when I called the number and tried to go through the process by entering what little info I had, which was a policy number, the system wouldn’t proceed; it was as if I had the wrong account-related number. (2) Getting those particular marketing notices in the mail as a suspected key part of the ACA signup seemed cheesy at best, and a possible fraud at worst.

As I write on this SHIT, it makes me angry, so I’ll stop.

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That was this morning. Now in the mid-afternoon, I am more collected about what to do, but I’ve been thinking I will keep careful records about further ACA business (as I already have), incidentally building a case, and I will be ready to defend myself lest I need to qualify for (as I recently heard you could apply for) an exemption from paying the ACA tax penalty in 2015, and/or presenting an argument to whomever it was relevant or necessary on why I believe the ACA process I was going through was erratic, if not fraudulent-seeming, through little or no fault of my own, hence I did not sign up for Medicaid (and hence I should get X relief…).

I even considered the droll possibility that this ACA situation constituted a case of tax fraud on the government’s part, in putting me through hoops that left me disserved partway through, predicated on which the government could then levy a tax penalty. That is, if in levying the ACA penalty, the government was saying in effect “You didn’t do what we wanted you to, hence…,” at which I could retort, “But I did do what I could, and your system turned out to be erratic shit.” That is, I might not have made a million attempts to iron out the problem (and why should I have?), but I had done all I could in applying, and it was the feds and/or the state that had dropped the balls. (But if a tax-fraud complaint should be filed, I can’t imagine I would do it, since that isn’t my area of specialty, even as a legal layperson who does some of his own legal work.)

(This all seems pretty ridiculous. I would never have expected to deal with this crap when graduating from college 30 years ago.)

Movie break: We catch Woody in a good mood: Midnight in Paris (2011)

Allen’s rhapsody about Paris and brief meditation on nostalgia

Second in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now

Also fits this series:

“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films

Subsections below:

An unusual love story for Allen

Characters aplenty

Technical notes

This film’s storyline is pretty straightforward; the film as a whole is far simpler than either You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) before it or To Rome with Love (2012) after it. Amid other features, it is one of his travelogue films, made in Europe in the 2004-11 period, and its enchantment with Paris, a city as ripe for photographing as any, is shown in its different-for-Woody Allen initial-title sequence.

After a very few initial textual identifiers (in his white lettering on black screen), a long series (three minutes or so) of shots of different buildings, boulevards, and other vistas is unrolled, reminiscent of the beautiful shots of New York City (which set a standard for initial sequences) at the beginning of Manhattan (1979). Playing underneath is tasteful music (seeming like a French type of jazz, with saxes, oboes [?], and trumpets; and a simple repetitive-figures melody).

Then Allen’s usual white-lettering-on-black background title sequence continues, but now we hear only some initial dialogue underneath—by Owen Wilson’s Gil Pender and Rachel McAdams’ Inez, Gil’s fiancée—including Gil’s rather-plainspoken enthusing about Paris.

An unusual love story for Allen

Interestingly for Allen, this film doesn’t stray too far from that initial blast of “Paris love” in photos and talk; Allen romanticized the city over the many years, which is heard in stray remarks through many of his films, including the likes of Husbands and Wives (1992), all as if by a wistful New Yorker who never quite got the wherewithal together to go. Finally Allen did (though this happened as a function of his several-year involvement with European film-producing companies, the one here being Mediapro [End note], which was behind Vicky Cristina Barcelona [2008] and Tall Dark Stranger), and the result is a film that, unusual for Allen, is downright reverent in terms of honoring a city other than New York.

The story features some “magical realism” of the type that, in Allen’s work, may not have occurred since The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Here, what I think is employed is an example (conceptually from the sci fi genre) of the “time slip.”

And as a story, MIP is fairly slight. Dealing with this film lately along with the very interesting Blue Jasmine (2013) and a set of unusual distractions in my life, I am a little apt to dismiss MIP as a lightweight, almost annoyingly-thin summer entertainment. More objectively, MIP is like a short story stretched out into a 90-minute film, while Blue Jasmine is like a small-to-medium, serious novel stuffed into a 90-minute film. In MIP, even the story element—so common in Allen—of one romantic relationship breaking down and another taking its place seems surprisingly muted and morally “as it should be” for an Allen film.

But I don’t want to say MIP is a waste of time; it is a very tonally nice example of late Allen, when he crafts a fairly simple story that is long on pleasing impression (rather like Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and, while including literary allusions, short on cause for a lot of audience thinking. More to our benefit, as a result of Allen’s “finally being able to rhapsodize about Paris,” it is quite pleasant.

Characters aplenty

Michael Sheen, here sporting what seems an American accent, is on hand as Paul, an American pedant (in Paris on business too; he is to lecture at the Sorbonne); helping the MIP story, he is giving commentary for tours around Paris to Gil, Inez, and company. Inez and Paul eventually have a romantic relationship going that supplants Gil’s with Inez, and oddly for an Allen film, this change of relationships doesn’t come with much sound and fury, and it seems to suit both Inez and Gil, who himself then takes up with a pleasant French woman who works in a nostalgia shop.

Kurt Fuller plays Inez’s dad John, who is in Paris to consummate a business deal, as the ostensible reason Gil and Inez are also there. Fuller seems a good choice to play a hard-ass dad; he also played the hard-headed boss “Mr. Head” in Adam Sandler’s Anger Management (2003).

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This film is a good work of Allen’s “for college students” (such as he occasionally did starting around Zelig [1983]), with a slew of famous names dropped that liberal arts majors can have fun picking out and identifying.

Among the famous names encountered here are writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (the film is worth seeing just for the parody of Hemingway; Corey Stoll plays him); painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso; composer Cole Porter; and others.

And consider other famous names and their assigned actors:

* Gertrude Stein is played by Kathy Bates, here well-cast as a sort of take-charge Earth mother-cum-cultural dean; if Stein here had the foul mouth of the mother Bates played in About Schmidt (2002), Bates would have provided a Gertrude Stein for our time;

* Adrien Brody is a sort of suitably weird Salvador Dali; and

* Alison Pill is the famously unstable Zelda Fitzgerald.

Marion Cotillard plays Adriana, a passion-driven woman (and cultural camp follower of sorts) who (at least per the film’s story) has affairs with several artistic names (from the 1920s, from whence she also comes), along with Gil.

The film seems almost weak in how it wraps up Gil’s odyssey, an odyssey in which he gets more entranced in visiting the famous figures from the 1920s, whether or not for feedback on his novel-in-progress. Adriana wants to, and gets to, go back (with Gil) to the 1890s, and it is in a visit to this decade where she and Gil have a philosophical discussion, heralding their “splitting up,” where she says that as a writer, he is all about words, while she is about passion. Gil for his part says that as a writer, he has to remove himself from illusions in his life as much as possible, and this means reducing nostalgia in his life. (This paraphrases.) This almost seems like Allen boiling down how he sees himself as a writer when he is being more clear-eyed realistic and less romantic.

Meanwhile, adding to Allen’s whimsical mix of fantasy and realism, it is a critique by Ernest Hemingway of Gil’s novel that sets Gil on the path to resolving something knotty in his own life. This is where Hemingway has detected that an affair has been going on between two characters in Gil’s novel, and Gil then infers that an affair has been going on between Inez and Paul, who are the source for Gil’s fictional characters. Amazingly, as a result of this, Gil and Inez seem to part ways, in the end, fairly amicably.

Technical notes

Darius Khondji, becoming one of Allen’s go-to production partners (working on four films for him in his post–Di Palma phase), handles cinematography.

An early scene (with Gil and Inez kissing) is set, I believe, at the famous pond from which Claude Monet got inspiration for his water-lily series of paintings. (My sister and her husband, on vacation, visited this location this just-past summer, and once home they showed plenty of photos from it.)

A fairly glaring script error (or an actor’s bad improvising?) is when Gil tells someone from the 1920s that he is “from the 2000^th millennium,” which of course makes no sense. He is from an era within 2000+ years that have passed until now, in the “Common Era” (or anno Domini), but the millennium he is in is the second.

Allen also employs little comic tricks that, if in other directors’ films, would be considered rather unoriginal types of jokes as if influenced by the better films of Woody Allen. For example, Gil tells Hemingway that a case can be made that all American literature as descended from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. I guess Gil gave the Old Man a good idea for a literary pronouncement, because Hemingway, in real life, did say this.

Gil similarly seems to give another famous figure an idea for future work when he suggests a story idea to Luis Bunuel, a one-time associate of Salvador Dali’s who would much later make films. I don’t know any of the background in the real Bunuel’s career to know what film Gil is giving him a “clue” to doing.

End note.

For this film, fairly typical of Allen’s European deals, there is a mix of staff, nationality-wise. This film’s producing administration is Spanish (from Mediapro), but the production crew (the hands-on sorts) are French, to judge from the end credits.