woody allen

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.

his "cynicism" is so facile though

Last one I love is Sweet & Lowdown

Alfred, I believe he calls it "realism"

which in his rendering is really just sentimentality.

meh, sometimes.

his "cynicism" is so facile though

otmfm. His cynicism used to resonate, or at least raise more questions than it squelched. He was facile (this is another great word with opposite meanings) with romantic futility. Now at best it's Bergman without the courage of its own premise, and at worst it tries to be funny and painfully fails.

Poor bastard. At some point everyone's best work is behind them, and you never know when that's going to be.

at this point life is behind him.

that's not fair -- life as he saw it was always behind him. He used to better at it, though.

"If I was speaking to the people who are protesting legitimately, I would try to convince them, if I could, that building the mosque takes a step toward eliminating this kind of thing from happening again. Preventing the mosque from being built is not a step in the right direction."

DiGiacomo asked Allen asked Allen if he has a bucket list of things he'd like to do before he dies. "Yes, and one of them is [to] live longer," the director responded. "That's at the head of the list."

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2010/09/earned_opinion.php

75th today for the altecocker

still only 75 wow, that means another 50 films before going out Manoel de Oliveira style.

really weird to me that he's "only" 75, he seems like he's in his 90s... I mean wasnt he writing for tv in the 50s? jesus...

i thought vicky christina barcelona was great - mainly because of penelope cruz (who i definitely didn't expect to like that much)

I mean wasnt he writing for tv in the 50s?

When he was about 19.

i thought vicky christina barcelona was great - mainly because of penelope cruz (who i definitely didn't expect to like that much)

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, December 1, 2010 8:20 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

]and rebecca hall yall

here's two woody allen bday links:

great 1985-circa interview with michiko kakutani:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1550/the-art-of-humor-no-1-woody-allen

amazing overview of his pre-movie career (tv writing, standup etc):

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

<3 HB

I say this with no false modesty—that I feel I have done no really significant work, whatsoever, in any medium. I feel that unequivocally. I feel that what I have done so far in my life is sort of the ballast that is waiting to be uplifted by two or three really fine works that may hopefully come. We’ve been sitting and talking about Faulkner, say, and Updike and Bergman—I mean, I obviously can’t talk about myself in the same way at all. I feel that what I’ve done so far is the . . . the bed of lettuce the hamburger must rest on. I feel that if I could do, in the rest of my life, two or three really fine works—perhaps make a terrific film or write a fine play or something—then everything prior to that point would be interesting as developmental works. I feel that’s the status of my works—they’re a setting waiting for a jewel. But there’s no jewel there at the moment.

I dunno if I buy that as "sincere" but I love the desire to keep going.

nah, rephrase, if he means that then I think he's barking up an imaginary tree that sucks

He's pretty much always said this. He used to sit around with Sid Caesar going "If I could just write you one decent skit, I would be happy".

He's whined like this for years. However, classic lol: "I feel that what I’ve done so far is the . . . the bed of lettuce the hamburger must rest on."

The college dropout intellectual in him is never going to be satisfied that he's made more good films than, say, the Marx Brothers did. (or Chaplin, at least when it comes to features)

yeah but it's a (false) fanboy point of view. It's great if it works as a motor for him but it doesn't mean anything beyond that.

what is it supposed to "mean"? it's just the way he thinks.

Happy Birthday! Let's hope he has a Fanny & Alexander in him..

tons of Mubi links, incl audio analysis from Judd Apatow :o

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/2593

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