The Nanny Attraction

"Nurse and Child" by Mary Cassatt

The local CBS TV station in New York City recently ran “The Nanny Attraction,” (“Moms Taking Steps to Defend Families From ‘NannyAttraction,’” CBS-New York, 2/15/16) The segment aired on the ll:00 o’clock news anchored by Maurice Dubois and Kristine Johnson, a news program that recently broke the bank in the area of insipid news by running a segment on a postman who was chased by dog. An example of their medical coverage is a story reported by their resident authority, Dr. Max Gomez entitled “New Lip Implant Offers Natural, Soft Look” (CBS-NewYork, 2/11/16). But cutting to the chase any woman stupid enough to hire a good looking young nanny deserves what she gets. Don’t they read ("The Curse of the Celebrity Nanny," The Daily Beast, ll/11/15)? Ben Affleck, Gavin Rossdale, Jude Law, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robin Williams and Mick Jagger are all pointed to in in The Daily Beast expose as examples of  celebrities who had or were suspected ot have had affairs with their nannies. Investigative reporting? The brunt of the in-depth examination by CBS's Hazel Sanchez had to do with various consultants who help prospective parents to profile nannies in order to make sure they’re stable. But this again misses the point. We assume any good-looking nanny is a gold digger. So the one doing the profiling should not be the parents, but rather the nanny who, before spreading her legs, should analyze the spreadsheet of the man whose affections she may end up stealing. ‘Watch out what you want for you may get it” is the homily that should be emblazoned on the consciousness of nubile nannies looking for Mr. Right. A fetching nanny is going places and the last thing she needs is to book passage on a sinking ship.

Jodorowsky’s Dune

Was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, “the greatest movie never made?” The South African director Richard Stanley makes that claim in Frank Pavich’s documentary about the ill fated project, currently playing at Film Forum. Writers, filmmakers and artists often fear they are putting a curse on an idea by talking about it before actually undertaking the work. One wonders if the same thing can be said about talking too much about postmortems, in which an unsuccessful attempt has resulted in a stillbirth. In the case of Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune, one wonders if it might have been better to let sleeping dogs lie. The documentary brings to light the  deficiencies of a millenarian project that might better have lived on a as a great mystery and question mark. Jodorowsky if you remember had achieved notoriety with El Topo which played midnights at Chelsea’s famed Elgin theater and other art house venues during the 70’s. Jodorowsky had come to film through the avant-garde directing productions of Beckett, Ionesco and others in Mexico before producing early films like The Holy Mountain, whose mixture of provocation and hallucinogenic spirituality appears, from the clips show in the documentary, to have combined the kitsch of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater Company with the high strung camp of Warhol’s Factory. Jodorowsky shared Warhol’s infatuation with celebrity and had enlisted  Pink Floyd, who'd just recorded “The Dark Side of the Moon” album to do a sound track. Salvador Dali agreed to work only if he received the highest salary in Hollywood at $100,000 an hour and Orson Welles was cajoled with the promise hiring the chef from his most favorite restaurant in Paris to cook his meals. Dali asks Jodorowsky “did you ever feel like you lost a clock in the sand?” and Jodorowsky proudly recounts how he won Dali over by answering “I never found a clock, but I lost a lot." In Jodorowsky’s recounting Mick Jagger, at the height of his fame, walked towards him at a Paris social function and agreed to participate. An enormous storyboard was created with the help of Dan O’Bannon, a Hollywood special effects expert who’d worked on John Carpenter’s Dark Star and would later co-write the screenplay for Total Recall, Jean Giraud, the comic book artist known as Moebius, Chris Foss, a designer of science fiction book covers and H. R. Giger, the Swiss painter. Everything about Dune was larger than life (in his failed pitch to Hollywood Jodorowsky talked about a movie that might be 20 hours long) and hearing  Jodorowsky’s claim that he would start the movie with a panning shot of the universe that would outdo the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, you get the feeling that this is one case where Hollywood was right. David Lynch’s Dune was a failure, but who knows if Jodorosky’s Dune might not have been the science fiction version of Heaven’s Gate. At the end of the documentary, Jodorowsky’s says “I was raping Frank Herbert, but with love.” That’s no guarantee Frank Herbert would have liked it.