OFAD #3: Another slice of Spam in Bananarepublic Land: Trashy marketing notices in the mail

Falls under a theme, “What It Takes to Be a ‘Backbone Democrat.’”

(“Obamacare: Full Adult Diaper?” is my subhead for this very occasional series, described here, subsection 6.)

[Edits 4/21/14. Edit 5/13/14, to End note. Edit 5/14/14, between asterisks.]

Before I get started, 20 years ago I was basically in favor of the Clinton Administration’s attempt at looking into starting a nationally instigated insurance plan. Here is a letter I wrote in relation to this, later in 1994.

Times have changed.

Today (April 19), The New York Times has a blurb on its Web site about an editorial (apparently) where the point is (I paraphrase), “Now that the ACA is showing some success, Democrats should start standing up for it.”

As someone who has voted Democratic for president every election since 1984, and did not vote for Reagan in 1980, I say, “You can skip over me on this one.”

On the same Times Web site, there is an article showing worry about how, as millions more Americans get coverage, with a recent up-tick in spending, government and the private sector may face increased costs….

Ah. So now we see: It isn’t about getting all the lazy, shiftless trash who “always” went to the ER because they didn’t have coverage, to “be good Americans” and get coverage with the ACA.

I said in a March 13 update in the second installment of this series, about a third of the way, or a quarter, into the entry, that I phoned again to the NJ FamilyCare office, and got the same result as for the fourth call noted in the original text of the entry. Well, I phoned more recently, again, and I heard what I’d heard (via a computerized system) on two previous calls: “This option is currently not available to you.” So I still didn’t know where my application, originally made in December, stands.

Meanwhile, in March (and again in very early April), I got a card in the mail, with the exact same content, from some entity called “Amerigroup RealSolutions,” asking me to call them on a toll-free number because they want to “collect some important information about your health.” This on the back of what amounts to a big postcard. Nothing so classy as a confidential letter inside an envelope.

What kind of entity seriously involved in querying about my health would contact me on the back of a postcard? (Imagine someone getting a postcard with a message blazoned on the back: “Your test results regarding HIV and hepatitis C have come back. Please give us a call as soon as possible, and make sure you have plenty of bleach in your house!”)

The name “Amerigroup,” as far as I can find on the Internet, is the administrator in charge of Medicaid in New Jersey. And I am supposedly being signed up (now, over a several-month period) for Medicaid.

I have nothing in hand. No Medicaid card. The Amerigroup postcard says, “please make sure you have your Amerigroup Community Care member ID card with you when you call.”

Well, I have no such ID card, so when I got this postcard the first time, I was annoyed at it but didn’t respond. That was about mid-March. The second postcard came April 2. Says exactly the same thing. (And both cards have the same message in Spanish. Here’s part of my response in Spanish: “No tengo un ‘Amerigroup Community Care member ID card.’ Tambien, este situacion es mierda de los gringos. Vay’ al mismisimo Diablo!” [Spanish accent marks are not included because of what software setup I have])

At first, after getting the second card, I wasn’t going to call. Heck, I wasn’t originally going to call NJ FamilyCare either. But I called both on April 2. No answer from NJ FamilyCare (i.e., I got the same response as with the "fourth call" I referred to above), and when I called Amerigroup….

I seemed to get shunted into a modern-day version of HAL 9000. A computerized female voice cued me to do certain things. It asked for an ID number. I put the policy number I’d gotten from the NJ FamilyCare phone service, months ago. The policy number didn’t work with Amerigroup. Tried again. Didn’t work. I hung up midway through the call.

Since then, still no ID card has come from FamilyCare. I could call for a fourth time, or whatever it is. But according to a Star-Ledger report (End note) (in the main newspaper of New Jersey) of a few weeks ago—and how long it took them to cover this, when the problems were evident back in January!—the FamilyCare organization was very much backed up in sending out Medicaid cards. A minority of applications for the Medicaid expansion program—which in New Jersey was initially handled (in 2013) via the federal Web site with info channeled over (in initially unusable form) to the state—had been processed so far.

If I get an ID card by the summer, that will probably be sufficient. I have no pressing, costly medical needs.

If Amerigroup sends me another postcard like the two I’ve already gotten, I’ll exclaim, “Caramba!!!”

If I seem kind of blasé about this all, well, I am. I really am not moved by the ACA drive. Not like I was interested in the Clinton project of 20 years ago.

And please, 20- and 30-somethings, don’t anyone follow my lead. I speak for myself on this.

##

End note.

Here is a URL for the article I refer to, which was also in the special health section of the print edition about two weeks ago. If you hit this link, it apparently won't take you to the article, but you go to a generic kind of nj.com page. (Beware of pop-ups--nj.com is BIG on them.) You can search for the article within the nj.com page with its links--it has a plethora of stuff in terms of New Jersey news--but I don't know if you can find it. [Update 5/13/14: The issue of The Star-Ledger, New Jersey's main newspaper, out today has an article starting on its front page about the remaining backlog of Medicaid-extension applications to be processed. Among other things, the article notes there are some 7,000 applicants still awaiting ID cards (I am one, which of course the paper could not have known). The paper also notes the "initial" backlog was due to  "unusable data sent to [the state's NJ FamilyCare program, which administers Medicaid here] by the federal government," which was "confirmed" by the secretary of the U.S. department of Health and Human Services in February (p. 1). Actually, I heard on January 6, when I phoned NJ FamilyCare, that it had received info from the federal government (gathered from applications made on the HealthCare.org Web site) that it couldn't use yet. And certainly with the backlog lingering as the winter went on, it's surprising it took the Ledger until *April* to start reporting on the backlog (the April date is reflected in this URL).]

Movie break (Quick Vu): Woody’s candy-colored palette of folk and media of a bygone era: Radio Days (1987)

A vivid nostalgia-fest links droll anecdotes with evocative '40s radio fare

Fifth in the series: Morning Becomes Reagan: A revisiting of 1980s pop (and political) culture

Also fits the series:
"We'll always have Woody": A look at Woody Allen films
 

Subsections below:

Details showing pluses and almost-minuses

Farrow’s character is the focus of most of the Allen-esque “romance comedy” here

Radio Days suitable as part of an “omnibus” approach to Allen scholarship

[Edits 4/17/14.]

This film is minor enough that I won’t dwell much on it—Woody Allen calls it a “cartoon” (End note 1), and its episodic structure (with no real, gripping story arc) and bountifully colorful production details mark it as rather whimsically entertaining on the level of Zelig (1983). I also didn’t have a lot of time to view it, but it didn’t grab me well enough to view it, say, three times, which is a minimum for a good film review of mine.

A film with a strong narrative line and thematic significance will strongly invite several close viewings; this film comes off as rather shallowly entertaining, and as such, in my current circumstances, it is almost off-putting. You marvel at how well the sets, costume, music—overall period detail—are done so conscientiously (or at least evocatively). But the anecdotes that fill out this film are, largely, baubles, and what overarching plot thread exists (maybe most notably with Mia Farrow’s Sally White) is amusing at best.

Ostensibly it’s autobiographical, but Woody Allen makes clear in Eric Lax’s interview compendium that it is only partly so. That is, several anecdotes start with real-life facts, but are adapted to a fictional standard for the film (End note 2). For instance, there is a situation where the boy Joe, who is a correlate for Allen (played by Seth Green, here a little squirt compared to the more adult-like Scottie he played in the 1997-2002 Austin Powers films), encounters (to his surprise) his father driving a taxi, but this is only partly based on Allen’s life. Allen says it was generally a mystery to him as a boy what his father did. Whenever he asked, he always “would get a different answer because he [his father] often switched jobs.” But as far as I can tell, Allen as a boy never encountered his father driving a taxi, as little Joe does in the film (Lax, p. 37).

Details showing pluses and almost-minuses

The photography is good; it is by Carlo Di Palma, who had first worked for Allen on Hannah and Her Sisters (see my review here), giving a sort of comfortably domestic/urban patina to that film, and he would be the cinematographer who shot more Allen films than any other (only Gordon Willis comes close). Here, Di Palma’s photography, combined with the elaborate set designs by Allen’s longtime production designer Santo Loquasto, makes perhaps the best and most consistently delivering aspect of the film.

The main characters are vivid in the way of cartoon figures, as Allen’s general description of this film implies. Julie Kavner cuts a sharp profile as the mother. Dianne Wiest is the wistfully hopeful Aunt Bea, who is always looking for a suitable husband (I think her voice is a little thin here, at least at times, while Kavner’s consistently comes right through).

Michael Tucker plays the father of Joe; Tucker did TV work in those days, I think (and he certainly did later). Josh Mostel is a newcomer to Allen’s fold as Uncle Abe. Abe is a rotund, jovial-looking character who is always bringing fish into the household that he’s gotten from shore fishermen, and once—during the Jewish High Holidays—he gets converted to communism by communist neighbors who are playing music during the Joe/Abe family’s abstaining religious observances. We’ve seen stories in this general realm before, but this one is played for pretty broad comedy.

Seth Green is interesting to watch in his scenes: unobtrusively but well enough if you watch him, he puts his heart into his acting, maybe a little more than Allen would ordinarily have directed a child to. In some scenes he’s on the receiving end of walloping corporal punishment (in an almost Three Stooges way), and he puts up with it patiently. In a New Year’s scene, he comes into view and gives his infant sister a kiss—this detail almost can be missed, with all that’s going on amid the extended family in the shot. Green’s take on a “Woody as a boy” character seems more well-rounded in this film than “Woody as a boy” (or, “the main character as a boy”) in the likes of Love and Death (1975), Annie Hall (1977), and Stardust Memories (1980).

Also, in a way, this film is a “homecoming” piece, in terms of actors, for Allen as was Hannah: Tony Roberts is here as a radio-show MC; Wallace Shawn, who put in a vivid appearance in Manhattan (1979), is here as the incongruous-looking Shmoe behind radio’s “Masked Avenger.” Two actors from The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) appear here almost like echoes of the earlier film’s characters: Danny Aiello is someone briefly here and named Rocco; and Jeff Daniels is here as a radio character who Joe as a boy felt would be the only person who believed that Joe had actually spotted a Nazi submarine in the bay off Rockaway Beach (I think is the local beach). Daniels’ character here is “Biff Baxter,” his moniker different only by first name from the “Tom Baxter” character he played in Purple Rose.

Farrow’s character is the focus of most of the Allen-esque “romance comedy” here

Among the few instances evidencing Allen’s capacity for sly, sharp, sexually (or couples-) related humor are those connected to the character Sally White, played by Farrow. White starts out as a cigarette girl in a swank nightclub. Here, a couple that performs as an upscale pair issuing golden words on radio has marital trouble: the male, seeming to me a bit like David Niven (though the couple seems to be Hispanic), has been having an affair with Sally. Herewith, a common Allen trope pops up: Sally says if he really loved her, he would leave his wife; but the man offers the excuse that his and his wife’s radio-show ratings are too high to do that.

A good deal later, on her own, Sally tries to get roles on radio, and has trouble because of her ditsy voice (which seems to go along with her frizzy-curls hair, which looks as substantial as soap suds). She undergoes voice lessons, and finally is on radio as some high-class, elegant-toned doyenne. She then appears to everyone, in real life, as if “to the doyenne manner born.”

It is in a late scene, at a New Year’s party (where Diane Keaton makes her brief cameo in this film as a singer), Sally is on a date with the man who, with Wallace Shawn’s bald head, voices the Masked Avenger. Having had a few too many drinks, Sally slips abruptly back and forth between her original ditsy, almost-screechy voice, and her more affected, poised doyenne’s voice, all of it inspiring in Shawn’s character a deeply puzzling look. Sally then takes her date up to the building’s roof, where she had had a tryst with the upscale man we saw her with early in the film. Thus rounds out a plot before-and-after situation, not as bawdy as you might think.

These details suggest this film is a rather wan, derivative effort of Allen’s. It is entertaining if you don’t want a lot of mental stimulation; but it is hard to work up enough enthusiasm for it to study it several times for a long “paper.”

Radio Days suitable as part of an “omnibus” approach to Allen scholarship

I’ve thought it’s useful for students or appreciative critics of Allen to consider his films in a sort of “omnibus” fashion, rather than (1) to look for a very select few “great artistic masterworks” or (2) to merely comb through his films for a big clutch of good one-liners or good story-bit encapsulations, as if no one film stands as a masterwork. So, to look at him from (for one omnibus combination) a nostalgia or creative-history perspective, you can combine Radio Days with the more “high-concept” Zelig (1983) and maybe with Bullets Over Broadway (1994).

Other omnibus pairings could be:

for New York/romance stories: Annie Hall (1977) with Manhattan (1979) and maybe also with Hannah and Her Sisters (1986);

for “perils of an artist” stories: Stardust Memories (1980) with Deconstructing Harry (1997);

for meditations on issues of deep moral choice: Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) with Match Point (2005);

and, for playful anachronism (or “time slip” or fantasy/realism intermixture) stories: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) with Midnight in Paris (2011).

Other pairings could be suggested as I review more films.

##

End note 1.

In DVD packaging: quote from Stig Bjorkman, Woody Allen on Woody Allen (1993): “I think of Radio Days basically as a cartoon.”

End note 2.

Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 38 (in an April 2005 interview): “So when you see Radio Days, my aunt takes me into town with her boyfriend and I watch them dancing, but none of that ever happened. I never went anywhere with my aunt and some boyfriend. Those relationships didn’t exist. That was pure drama for the story. …

“I’m relying on information in my life, but that’s why I say it’s not autobiographical. It’s much more exaggerated to make the story better.”

Movie break: At a crossroads in my hike through Woody’s dense career

[Edits 5/6/14. Edits 5/24/14. Edit 5/28/14. Edits 6/17/14. Edits 7/9/14. Edits 8/18/14.]

Here’s a quickie indication of where I’m going with my Woody Allen reviews.

As I pretty much intended, I have touched on nearly all of his films from his “major phase” of 1977-86 (as defined by my “Director’s dossier” on him, viewable here; and see the list at the end of this entry). In coming entries I will continue to look at his career, but more selectively. I will have some essay-like statements to make about him that are apart from particular films, hopefully in an entry or entries coming very soon.

Films of his I either definitely will review or am likely to review include (and some reviews will be short [and some are already posted]):

Radio Days (1987) (the review is here)

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) (the review is in Part 1 here and Part 2 here)

Husbands and Wives (1992) (Part 1 of the review is here; Part 2 is here; and Part 3 is here)

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) (the review is here)

Bullets Over Broadway (1994) (the review is here)

Mighty Aphrodite (1995) (to come)
Deconstructing Harry (1997) (to come)
Sweet and Lowdown (1999) (my truncated review is here)
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) (my review is the first half of this)
Hollywood Ending (2002) (my review is the second half of this)
Anything Else (2003) (my review is here)

Match Point (2005) (my review is here)

A few others, as conditions allow

Intermission: Bits by Woody, gathered here like flotsam

Here are a few quotes and other things that relate to the Woody Allen movies I’ve already reviewed, which either would be cumbersome to put with the appropriate review, or which I forgot to include, or which stand well as “afterthoughts.”

Related to Stardust Memories (1980) (see my review here):

Bearing on the issue that the movie wasn’t about himself but was a fictional concoction:

“The audience in the movie was just an exaggerated depiction of what somebody [e.g., the film’s Sandy Bates] who couldn’t appreciate his success might imagine under the pressure of being a hit and yet still being unable to stave off life’s tragedies or have a real love relationship.”

—Allen in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (New York: Knopf, 2007), pp. 231-32

Epigraph I wanted to put with my review of Broadway Danny Rose (1984) (see my review here) and neglected to, due to a clumsy error in handling my Word files:

“Not only is he a great agent, but he really gives good meeting.”

—a bit player in Annie Hall (1977), in a scene with Hollywood and music-industry movers, shakers, and miscellaneous others at a party at the mansion of music producer Tony Lacy (played by Paul Simon); yes, I believe the quote is accurate, and it definitely is meant to satirize agent/producer/insider pretenses and lingo

##

Films I’ve already covered:

Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975)

Interiors (1978)

Manhattan (1979)

Stardust Memories (1980) 

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) and Zelig (1983)

Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)