Mia Farrow's son -- Ronan Seamus Farrow -- really creeps me out!

Allen sets up Paul Simon to be a self-centered jerk, yeah; the powdery voice, determined to avoid offense, is the key.

Manhattan is all Tony Laceys though, Tracy excepted.

agreed DL, she doesn't seem v perceptive in these instances (perhaps a hangover from being a cultural critic writing in the pre-VHS era) (or perhaps she was just writing an out and out hit piece)

in 2014 she'd have a tumblr and get hyperlinked by Andrew Sullivan.

Didion on Allen = most of ILX on Frances Ha/Girls

yes and quite right too!

I am rarely convinced by the "you're not meant to like this character" argument; maybe not, but when a character is afforded so much attention and screen time you're sure meant to identify with them on some level. and don't forget, a kind of arch self-loathing is also fundamental to the mindset Didion identifies, a smug acknowledgement of what terrible human beings we are that pre-empts actually changing that

I prefer the early funny ones, aero, roughly ending with Zelig

and "The Moose Story" of course

contemporary essays bore me, and post-EM Forster novels gen the same

lex, have you seen manhattan?

fuck, lex otm too. I feel like everyone itt is otm. I don't know what to think anymore.

i don't know which WA film i've half seen, it was ages and ages ago and I left the room halfway through because it was aggravating me

i mean I am rarely convinced by the "you're not meant to like this character" argument; maybe not, but when a character is afforded so much attention and screen time you're sure meant to identify with them on some level. seems like a crazily reductive and un-nuanced approach to cinema.

xp aha right, gotcha. will take that as a "no" then.

dunham doesn't really do reference comedy at all. that point about art/life as passive consumption feels almost prescient w/ tumblr, etc, now. i doubt it's a new phenomenon at all though manhattan might be the first time i can think of it being documented somewhere. i know there's alot of derision towards that kind of culture consumption but it seems perfectly healthy and normal in an adolescent, where you're both defining yrself and encountering (and possibly understanding) 'adult' art for the first time. god knows that this is probably a large part of why manhattan was my fave woody allen as a kid. it's when ppl are still in this mode as 25 year olds, 30 year olds, 40 year olds, etc that it becomes repulsive. interesting to contrast this adolescent mode of consumer culture w/ a standard adult mode where music is something that's on while you drive or wash dishes etc, comparable to scented candles, and movies are macguffins that enable socializing and conversation. the 'adult' mode is much less attached and personally invested in whatever piece of culture has been consumed but not really any more passive than the juvenile mode. obv it's common to go from the juvenile mode to the adult mode (and arguably the juvenile mode isn't even the most common mode for adolescents, i would argue that most teenagers generally consume culture in that adult mode), and it's common for ppl to stay stuck in that juvenile mode where they're grown men or women (but generally men right?) and still obsessed w/ sci-fi, baseball, movies, whatever (collecting toys even), sort of walter benjamin meets peter pan, but i wonder how common it is for ppl to go from that detached adult mode as a teen to attached juvenile mode as an adult.

my pt was a more general one about that kind of argument, not really about the merits of his films, which I have no interest in contemplating, especially now, though descriptions of WA's style even from his fans make them sound incredibly awful

seems like a crazily reductive and un-nuanced approach to cinema.

I...understand that sometimes this is an appropriate critique, but in this context it reads as, "You're just not sophisticated enough to get it."

I do respond to Didion's complaint about therapyspeak infecting language, a trend which started as Freud got chic in the fifties but accelerated in the seventies. The characters don't talk so much as hurl psychobabble at each other. It's like when students say "I have jealousy issues" instead of "I'm a jealous person" or say "issues" when they mean problems.

xps balls probably not that common - the older you get, the more you generally have obligations and life generally crushing you into dust. the idea that maintaining "juvenile passions" being actually acceptable/approved as an adult does seem like a relatively new phenomenon

I...understand that sometimes this is an appropriate critique, but in this context it reads as, "You're just not sophisticated enough to get it."

Right, well, that wasn't my intention, and lex is a dear friend of mine IRL, but i'm a bit flabbergasted by the suggestion that movies never expect you to look askance at their central characters (hello, Downfall?), and wonder if his take might be different if he'd actually seen the movie we're all talking about?

Not that he has to, not that people aren't entirely justified in never wanting to see a Woody Allen movie after or even before the events of the last couple of weeks, but if someone's suggesting there's a certain nuance to a way a character's being portrayed, just disregarding this even as a possibility seems reductive.

I'd like him to explain that point too if he can. I rarely relate to characters on screen or in novels.

the unsmug way to pre-empt changing what terrible human beings we are is millennia of history.

dunham doesn't really do reference comedy at all

Off the top of my head: "when you were dating that guy who still has a Hotmail account"

There's all kinds of ways to write jokes that not everyone is going to get. Some people do it w/ contemporary pop music or Game of Thrones refs that are lost on me, some do it with "I love him like a brother-in-law... David Greenglass."

Back on topic: I hear Ronan Farrow looked totally clueless on Bill Maher's show last week.

UNICEF = Underground National Investigation of Crimes Enacted by Farrow

I rarely relate to characters on screen or in novels.

We had this conversation really productively and at length on another thread iirc! :)

Back on topic: I hear Ronan Farrow looked totally clueless on Bill Maher's show last week.

How is this on topic

yes!

xpost

that point about art/life as passive consumption feels almost prescient w/ tumblr, etc, now. i doubt it's a new phenomenon at all though manhattan might be the first time i can think of it being documented somewhere.

Huysmans iirc!

I do respond to Didion's complaint about therapyspeak infecting language, a trend which started as Freud got chic in the fifties but accelerated in the seventies. The characters don't talk so much as hurl psychobabble at each other. It's like when students say "I have jealousy issues" instead of "I'm a jealous person" or say "issues" when they mean problems.

― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, February 4, 2014 11:09 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is so clearly something that allen pokes fun at

Exactly.

Also: a smug acknowledgement of what terrible human beings we are that pre-empts actually changing that

I don't think you spend your life in therapy if you're not interested in change. Equally, the characters in Girls and Frances Ha are desperate to change. The fact they haven't got there yet doesn't mean the message is "lol we're so awful."

this is so clearly something that allen pokes fun at

― socki (s1ocki),

He does in Husbands and Wives. At this stage he's still learning what to do with a camera and how long to let a scene run (ugggh just remembered that painful Yale-Issac exchange in the classroom)

Ya think? It's what Manhattan (and Diane Keaton's character) is essentially about. xp

"An idea for a short story about um people in Manhattan who uh are constantly creating these real, uh, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves 'cause it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about, uh, the universe."

...really shocking that him and Mia didn't work out

I think stevie's reading of Manhattan is the right one, but Lex isn't really off base here either. WA is clearly not presented as the villain of the film, more like lovably misguided, and I think you are meant to relate to him despite all his bad choices.

in Interiors it's hard to distinguish the psychobabble from the Constance Garnett-translated English they talk.

I still don't understand how Interiors supposedly cures Didion's tin ear for comedy

I"m saying that everything she says about Interiors – its awful spoken English, wooden performances, and modish conceptions for characters – is accurate.

Interiors is a pretty terrible film. Much prefer Stardust Memories, in terms of drama.

Alfred i hate to tell ya Arthur Miller is p hilarious too if you have naturalistic expectations

continued conflation of Woody film seminar w/ this shitstorm, wtf

stardust memories is a weird one cuz it has some of the most tonally confusing WA stuff: someone already discussed upthread the flirty talk abt charlotte rampling's sexual relationship w her father, but weirder and more uncomfortable to me is the scene where the fat woman describes her own rape and i've never ever been positive we're not supposed to laugh cuz she's fat. (she says "i didn't even resist" and the WA character says "well, knowing you"!) ironically this spectre of serious cruelty makes the scene much more "effectively" "disturbing" than the less ambiguous one in crimes&misdemeanors when cliff's sister describes her own sexual violation, but the scene embarrassed me the last time i watched the movie with people who hadn't seen it.

There's no reason why that awful scene with Cliff's sister is in C&M. It stops the movie cold and has no payoff unless we're meant to think "I'm so lonely I went out with a serial defecator" is akin to "I'm so lonely I'm obsessed with Alan Alda hitting on Mia Farrow"

i always wince when it starts. i think it's supposed to be something like, people are crazy disgusting rapists and you can't even tell, they seem nice. um.

xp yeah, both scenes are really awkward, and hard to sit through now. always thought, though, that the 'Well, knowing you' line underlined this sense that, ironically, before his fawning fans, nobody's actually listening to anything he's saying, they're just basking in the glory his company. It's a massively self-hating, misanthropic mess of a film, but still compelling and, the last time I saw it, sort of moving.

cliff seems legit upset at his sister's defilement, but yeah, the point of the scene seems to be "shit be crazy, what to do? \0/"

ps don't want to come off as a Woody apologist on this thread, the Dylan letter is really upsetting and pretty hard to argue with, and i have no interest in arguing with it, and no massive desire to see another Woody movie, but he has been a favourite movie maker of mine for the longest time, and while his movies are often wildly problematic, i think there's some nuances that have been missed in places here.

Yeah that scene was always a little o_O for me too, mostly just his flip attitude toward it and the character's response of sort of blaming her for it when she's had this terrible experience. But I also thought there was a thematic purpose there sort of paralleling the mobbed-up brother -- you know, there's a very thin wall between what we think of as normal decent life and the dark nothingness lurking outside.

I think the point is rather that the dark nothingness is coming from inside the house.

i admit to liking "a strange man defecated on my sister." "why?" "i-- i don't know. is there any reason i could give you that would answer that satisfactorily?"

mostly for the flat disinterest w which she says "why"

I think the dark nothingness plopped on the sister's body.

Going hard with the bitter Mia/Dylan-was-coached angle:

http://news-briefs.ew.com/2014/02/04/woody-allen-abuse-dylan-farrow-attorney/

I always though she said "why" because she's thinking, "Great. Yet another man defecated on this insect's sister."

you guys are fucking weird

I'm not ruling out the "implanted memory" theory, I just want someone to produce one single example of a traumatic memory being fabricated, "implanted," and remaining to adulthood.

i mean about the poop