woody allen

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

whaaaaaaaaat

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

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Thursday, September 16, 2010 1:44 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This is true. In the occasional interview and whatnot, he has proven that he still is very funny, somehow he lost the ability to translate this to film?

whatever works is pretty funny. criticisms of it sorta lay in its lack of depth iirc. i know it's a seventies script etc etc etc but it's all his.

my criticism of it was that I didn't laugh. in fact, I fell asleep about halfway through iirc

it was one of those things that looked great on paper and then in execution was just argggh why

I have skipped a whole bunch of '00s Woody, incl Larry David and some of the ScarJos

the new one is not bad, pretty black-hearted as usual

are there joeks

not a lot.

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