woody allen

If I like the person enough then I'm sure I've some way of dealing with it.

Er........what a shit reply.

But of course the second I met someone as clever as I, I fucking went and got engaged to him. *sigh* Maybe I'm not as bright as I thought.

My point being, there are different kinds of smart. Wot-evah works...

To answer the (fascinatingly perverse) question, I date girls who are not as cultivated as me, and deal with this by attempting to fill them up with my junk. When I find a girl who can match me, and who just happens to be model-like, I freak out.

'well, i'm very shallow and empty and have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.'

'and i'm exactly the same way.'

haaaaa

I forgot how high Woody Allen's voice is. It's higher than mine, I think.

^ My kinda revive.

Actually, I noticed in his recent Fresh Air interview, his voice is getting a little raspy and old-mannish!

I just watched Annie Hall and I felt like freaking Big Bertha bcz of his little voice.

Whereas his voice makes mine seem a little more manly.

So: engaged in this very slow chronological watch-through of his films, and was thoroughly expecting his career to be back-loaded with crap. But I think Sweet & Lowdown might be one of my absolute favorites.

he's pretty great up through 2000 - but the 00s have been a bad decade for him. a lot of crap

Whatever Works is great! Esp. the monologue at the beginning. I've sworn off the Times.

totally disagree - watched it Saturday and thought it was terrible. Larry David couldn't sell that dialogue, which wasn't any good to begin with for the most part, and everything seemed so half-assed and predictable and tired...

I think after a decade of bad films (Match Point excepted) its time Allen and I parted ways. he's definitively past it now.

how do u think he'll react?

whinily

his recent work makes What's New Pussycat? look masterful.

sad but true

What's New Pussycat has jokes at least

god i hate WNP

couldn't make it through anything else tbh

i mean whatever works

an equally unmemorable title

Woody hates WNP too! The question is why he doesn't hate these scripts he's shooting.

well he's never been a good judge of his own work but at this point I assume he just continues out of habit

Doesn't he periodically call a lot of his disasters his favourite film to date when making them?

I dunno, but he said he wanted to scrap Manhattan when he finished it.

I want a copy of this:

http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/51T-PMA6C-L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

I think a lot of those are available online somewhere.

Doesn't he periodically call a lot of his disasters his favourite film to date when making them?

To his credit, he usually hates his films.

Move over Scarlett Johansson — Woody Allen has a new muse: France’s first lady, the model-turned-singer Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

The brunette beauty will appear in Woody’s next film in a role that is, as yet, undefined, reports Bloomberg.

“He offered me a role in his next movie,” Carla told a French TV show yesterday.

“I don’t know for what character, but I said yes. I’m not an actress at all,” says the wife of France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy. “Maybe I will be terrible. But, in my life, I cannot let such a chance go.”

Previously, Woody, 73, has waxed lyrical about 25-year-old Scarlett — who has starred in three of the director’s movies, Match Point, Scoop and Vicky Cristina Barcelona — saying, “She’s very charming, very bright, very amusing.

“She livens the set up. The minute she walks on the set, the amperage goes up 200 points… Whenever there’s a part she could play, she would probably always be my first choice.”

this fuckin guy

Thorough summary of Woody's first 20 years in showbiz, including the magazine ads he did:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2010/02/the-early-woody-allen-.html

Links to some clips from "Hot Dog", a kids' show from '71 which is the first time I remember seeing him on TV. Woody & Jo Ann Worley on how money is made:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AtALhw0Ksc

Q. How do you feel about the aging process?

A. Well, I’m against it.

[....]

Q. Were you prepared for the firestorm of media coverage you set off by casting Carla Bruni-Sarkozy in your next movie, “Midnight in Paris”?

A. I was very surprised at the level of journalism that occurred in relation to her.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/movies/15woody.html?src=me&ref=general

Love that first answer. The whole interview is pretty entertaining.

Ime, Woody has two well-developed schticks: Funny Woody with his gulping delivery of every line and Artsy Woody who stays behind the camera and creates little drawing room dramas. I can't say I'm much taken with either schtick. I can take them or leave them. Mostly leave them.

funny Woody was frequently great and still has (hot) flashes of brilliance

I can't remember the last movie he did that was genuinely funny tbh. nothing this decade.

Curse of the Jade Scorpion maybe

http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/6595/050708095500.jpg

That reminds me of when Jean-Luc Godard saw Deconstructing Harry back in the '90s and said something like, "I didn't see any deconstruction in it"

I agree that the philosophical aspects of Hannah and Crimes seem superficial, as do the Bergman/Fellini et al. cribs, but both movies have a really good grasp of structure and tone and pacing/timing and, well, all-around direction. Also, each of them runs about an 1:45, which is inconceivable today (and works to their benefit from a contemporary vantage); both of these movies would run 2:20+ today, or be expanded into 6+ hour limited series, but Woody keeps them tight.

I think the key to their superficiality, at least from my extremely limited perspective, is that the bifurcated nature of at least both of these films I just watched work in a disarming way. You get bumbling Woody typically saying the obvious stuff out loud (movie/philosopher/novelist references), but then the non-Woody stories allow you, the viewer, to explore many of the same or related ideas a lot more naturally. You *hear* what Woody is saying, but you *see* Martin Landau stewing in guilt/self-loathing/narcissistic panic, and one informs the other.

And yeah, especially knowing what we all know about Woody now, it is a little queasy to watch him inject his own insecurities and tics and fetishes and whatever into his stories, but it is what it is. Husbands and Wives is next! (Iirc the first movie to garner shakey-cam complaints?), then Another Woman. Then maybe a rewatch of Annie Hall (which I haven't seen in decades)? Then if I'm still interested I might pick and choose between some of his other '80s movies. It's been a while since I watched the early comedies, too!

I happened to write a bit about Husbands and Wives last week when I commemorate Davis' work.

some of his other '80s movies

Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the aforementioned Radio Days are all great movies from that period which depend less on the philosophy/references and aren't about NY intellectuals.

crimes and misdemeanors is a very cynical film if you take it at face level, the way it presents itself.

there is the guilt and self-loathing, the parallels to raskolnikov's experience in crime and punishment.

but the conclusion is that martin landau can just get over it. by the end, his guilt fades, the way all powerful emotions fade. this is because he lives in a godless universe, unlike raskolnikov whose psyche was formed by a culture that believed god was watching.

it's ivan's quote from the brothers karamazov, "if god is dead, everything is permitted." woody seems to be claiming that that is true in this film. which is every different from the normal secular position that basic morality --- you know, don't kill people just because it is convenient --- can be grounded in something besides god.

i feel like in the end this is kind of like, superficial, high school style philosophy. it's too on the nose, doesn't make space for ideas that could complicate the basic dostoevskian premise. but it becomes kind of creepy when you think about the fact that movie was made by someone who really did cross moral lines, who had good reason to be eaten up by guilt. is that what woody is grappling with here? trying to convince himself that not just god, morality, is dead? that guilt has no more purchase on us than other passing emotions like hunger or frustration?

to me, that sucks and is even evil. using dostoevsky to justify being a pedophile.

xp Broadway Danny Rose is a personal favorite as well. I only have a broad familiarity with Woody Allen's professional life, so I can't say how much or how precisely it drew from his background in show business, but I got the impression it helped the film partly because the old show biz world was something that held a deep affection from him. Even the old school managers (or agents?) telling and listening to his story feel warmly depicted.

I grew to appreciate his short film in Life Lessons as well and didn't realize how rare it had become to see a purely comic film from him when he made it. There was plenty of comedy in his films before then, but usually as part of a hybrid of dark drama and comedy or occupying half a film instead of all of it.

A lot of people were down on his post-'90s work because too much of it is weak, as if he stretched himself thin over way too many films (and I never disagreed with that argument), but even the worst ones had at least a couple scenes that I thought were hilarious. I didn't see any of his films after Blue Jasmine and missed at least a few before then, so I can't say if this is true for all of them, but you could probably string together at least an hour's worth (maybe even two hours) of hilarious scenes from what's been several very uneven decades of work. With Deconstructing Harry, "you're soft" would be the first thing to come to mind.

but the conclusion is that martin landau can just get over it. by the end, his guilt fades, the way all powerful emotions fade. this is because he lives in a godless universe, unlike raskolnikov whose psyche was formed by a culture that believed god was watching.

Pairing it with the other story, which concludes with Allen wallowing in self-pity for being the one "righteous" person left in the story, makes it all the more nauseating for me. This is actually another reason why I thought Match Point was a better film, the protagonist was never going to forget what he did or shed his guilt.

It's never clear whether we're supposed to sympathize with Allen's loser-schmuck in C&M. I'm sure I wasn't the only teen to think Alan Alda, though a prick, was way cooler.

He's an asshole who loves his blind brother and quotes Emily Dickenson.

Yeah Woody's character in C&M is not the hero of the story that he thinks he is.

I like when Alda's character is depicted as an asshole because when he acts like one, the film's fully aware of that. But when there were terrible moments like the one I mentioned of Allen's character with his sister, I didn't get the same impression with Allen's character. His stubbornness may be calculated to keep us from sympathizing too much - and as funny as his edit was to the documentary, it's obvious that was going to get him fired and we knew that was going to cause problems at home - but I remember coming away thinking he was a jerk for other reasons too. Maybe it's not the best comparison, but it reminds me of the Ghostbusters discussion that came up recently - when I saw that as a kid, I thought Bill Murray's character was a jerk, and I liked Bill Murray, but I rarely heard people say that about Murray's character whenever they talked about the movie, if anything they loved him for it.

oh GOD that scene with Allen's sister is in contention for the worst conceived and directed up to that point. Everything is wrong -- the way her date's dressed, the scenario itself, the way the camera pans to Allen's horrified response. It's mean, mean, mean for no reason.

I'm surprised more people don't complain about it! If you saw it today for the first time, you might think "what is this shit? No one said anything about this!"

Anyway, one more thing about the ending - the idea of someone committing terrible deeds and not being bothered about it isn't false. (Just look at what's happening with our government.) But these actions aren't committed in a vacuum - they're still inflicted on other people and likely have an impact beyond just one person or the specific target of the wrongdoing. So even if it doesn't bother someone to do these things, and they're even aided and abetted by other venal individuals, there are still consequences of some kind that resonate, and it's just weird and arguably dishonest the way it plays out in the movie. Like Huston is dead....and that's it? No one else cares, she has no one else who knew her?

by the end, his guilt fades

Does it? I didn't get the sense that his guilt faded, just that he learned to live with it, or was willing to accept it as a price for his personal comfort and pride.

And yeah, I didn't get the feeling we were supposed to sympathize with Woody's character, who was clearly driven by envy/jealousy at what Alan Alda had and he wanted (from professional success to Mia Farrow). I guess the character exists as a sort of alternative ethical delineation and compromise; I'd do anything for love, but I won't do that, to coin a phrase. I'll leave my wife (the source of their friction is never revealed, though it's interesting I suppose that *she* ultimately leaves *him,* just as Barbara Hershey does all the leaving in "Hanna"), but I won't sell out my art. In the meantime, there's nothing obviously *bad* about Alda beyond behind successful in life/art/love, and ... that's not bad. Woody's character puts on a brave front, but he's a coward, ethically and morally. Landau's similarly cowardly character puts on a front, too - wracked by narcissistic guilt - but whenever he is given the choice to do the right thing (which is to say, the morally easier thing) he chickens out. As Ebert put in his review (which I read after I watched it):

Threatened with exposure on both fronts, Judah makes a call to Jack, and Jack calls back: “It’s taken care of.” Now listen to Judah: “I can’t speak. I’m in shock. God have mercy on us, Jack.” How about a little mercy for Dolores? Judah has mastered the art of ameliorating his crime by being shocked at it. Yes, he had Dolores killed — but if he feels terrible about it, doesn’t that prove he’s not an entirely bad man?

And yeah, I totally agree the scene with Woody and his sister is totally/tonally gross/weird and out of place.

Like Huston is dead....and that's it? No one else cares, she has no one else who knew her?

I think this is a facet of the film's cynicism, but also Woody's own remove from the "real world," which iirc is explicitly referenced as such - "the real world" - by Landau. That is, that other place, with these other people, with victims and killers and crimes people care about. Rather than his (Woody's) rarified world, where crime - you know, real crime - is something that happens to other people somewhere else. Because Landau's not a criminal, he just moved some money around is all, and paid it back. And yeah Dolores is dead, but what was he supposed to do? And he feels so bad about it, too. To him, murder is just another (earned) luxury.

Kudos to Jerry Orbach for playing Jack as a let's-cut-the-crap embittered man with no patience for his brother's bullshit.

...and without knowing it he echoes Dolores' wish: the time to come clean was to his wife about his mistress.

Orbach seems to have internalized his aunt's might-makes-right cynicism on display at the Seder more than professed atheist Landau.

Blue Jasmine was the last film of his I saw, and, looking at what came after, maybe his last good film?

yeah and I can't even with Cate Blanchett's work, just unwatchable there

i recall liking this but I don't remember why. maybe because it was set in SF

imo Sweet and Lowdown is the last objectively good film he made... I couldn't heartily recommend any past that though there are some that I enjoy and some that are decent (and yeah VCB might be the best of them; I don't remember Match Point and should rewatch sometime). I think Cafe Society was the last I saw.

It was kind of surprising to me how often Match Point popped up when I googled lists of favorite/best Woody Allen movies. In fact, when I was talking to a normie last weekend, no movie snob or anything, she told me that Match Point is one of her favorite movies that she watches whenever it is on. She couldn't remember the title though, lol. "The one with Scarlett Johansson and tennis and a murder."

i recall liking this but I don't remember why. maybe because it was set in SF

yeah but he just treated SF as an extension of NYC, he didn't even pretend to make the city a realistic part of the film... I generally like Bobby Cannavale but he was a full-on NYC slob in that film, I think he even said 'fuggetaboutit' or something like that

Hitchcock was a better San Francisco director than Woody Allen will ever be

Allen always had egregious problems with any setting that wasn't NYC. (Match Point was heavily criticized for this in the UK.)

FWIW, the new biography by Patrick McGilligan held a poll asking people their top 5 Woody Allen films, and these were the top results:

1. Annie Hall (84 votes)
2. tie - Crimes and Misdemeanors (54), Hannah and Her Sisters (54)
4. Manhattan (46)
5. Purple Rose of Cairo (26)
6. Midnight in Paris (24)
7. Zelig (21)
8. Broadway Danny Rose (20)
9. tie - Radio Days (18), Match Point (18)
11. tie - Vicky Cristina Barcelona (13), Blue Jasmine (13)
13. Bullets over Broadway (12)

I was surprised that Bullets over Broadway wasn't getting much mention here, a solid film with the added bonus of no Woody in it.

I found Cusack's Woody imitation throughout irritating

xps No one actually likes the "early, funny ones" I guess

I feel like at least Love and Death deserves a nod

xps No one actually likes the "early, funny ones" I guess

my father LOVED these films, the dumber the better

Sleeper is top five.

Manhattan never did a thing for me even before we learned about his private life; the b&w photography embalms the characters.

Bananas is hilarious. Louise Lasser was such an asset.

Manhattan looks sumptuous, I'd argue, but was the quickest to become unwatchable after the scandals broke. I used to argue that the movie presents Woody's character as a villain in the piece, and his relationship with Hemingway's character as an amoral folly, but I think that's what I wanted to see.

was just researching whatever happened to Mariel Hemingway (she's still around, still working a bit) but came across this show that she appeared in... has anyone heard of this? Sounds kinda cool, I wonder if it's on youtube or somewhere:

The Hidden Room is an American drama-horror anthology television series geared mainly towards women, which aired on the Lifetime cable network for 33 episodes from 1991 to 1993. Each episode usually centered around a woman in a hardship, but with a dark Twilight Zone-ish twist. Most episodes starred a well-known actress in the lead role.

Yeah I never liked Manhattan as much as I expected to, given it's critical reputation.

In the last act he films this exchange between Yale (ugh that name) and Issac in a classroom that ping-pongs from accusation to response, accusation to response, over and over and over. It's quite tedious. He hasn't learned (if he ever did) how to write more sides for his characters, learned to direct actors around the shortcomings, or to use his camera to overcome those two problems.

Isn't the point of that exchange that he's stood next to the skull of a primate? I remember it being referred to as the kind of joke that would be lost if the movie wasn't given a widescreen video transfer on VHS or TV. It's not much of a joke, though.

lol yeah

Never forget his notion of visual humor during this era:

https://i.imgur.com/aNvxZkz.jpeg

At least a few of Mia's kids were adopted from Vietnam, which makes that ever weirder. Trivia I just read:

Stardust Memories stands out in Allen’s filmography for being the only film between Sleeper (1973) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) that features neither Diane Keaton nor Mia Farrow. This break from his usual casting choices adds to the film’s distinctiveness, reinforcing its position as an outlier in Allen’s filmography.

I like Stardust Memories. The mural is not just a gag, it is a kind of oblique and cynical reference to pop art and the commodification of politics i thought.

I don’t think it says anything clear. It is just there — the way images of atrocities simply are present in the background of our lives, today definitely but also during the vietnam war

He thought the image looked cool, I suspect.

Stardust Memories also feels like he's test-driving new leading ladies: Rampling; Jessica Harper; and Marie-Christine Barrault.

XP Also foreshadows his fantasy/nightmare of being assassinated.

Wild to think it was still in theatres when John Lennon was killed.

someday soon woody allen will die and maybe I'll feel ok going back and watching these again. I think I watched the bulk of them in the space of about two months about 20 years ago. I watched them so close together that lots of them just bleed into one another

Huh. I completely forgot that Shadows and Fog existed... and I saw it in a theater

The 2014 visit to Newport was not the first time Epstein tried to get his “girls” onto a Woody Allen set. Emails from the latest DOJ document release show that between 2010 and 2017, he attempted to influence or aid Allen’s casting process. “I’m with Woody Allen and [he is] looking for beautiful girls to cast. Any ideas?” he asked one modeling-agency owner, whose identity has been redacted, in a 2012 email. In another exchange with Faith Kates, the co-founder of the modeling agency NextModels, Epstein asks if she has any “aspiring actresses” in her stable, as “woody and i are having dinner on sunday.” (Allen and Kates did not return requests for comment.)

Allen and Epstein’s close friendship is well documented, with the former showing up in the disgraced sex trafficker’s files more than 3,000 times. Emails between the two show that they corresponded up until 2018, long after Epstein’s publicly known 2008 conviction of solicitation of a minor. Epstein also maintained a close relationship with Previn, Allen’s wife, regularly attending dinners at the couple’s home and doing favors for them, including donating $15,000 to an elite K–12 all-girls school on one of their daughter’s behalf and helping another get into Bard College in 2017 by introducing her to the college’s president, Leon Botstein. Emails also show that Epstein pulled strings to get Previn a tour of the White House in 2015. (Previn also did not respond to a request for comment.)

https://www.thecut.com/article/woody-allen-jeffrey-epstein-movies-wonder-wheel-irrational-man.html