woody allen

...or not in the Farrow family

classy commenters from the Ellen James Society

Finally saw Cassandra's Dream last night (OK, not great), so I can rank the last 10 films now:

Match Point
Blue Jasmine
Scoop
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Magic in the Moonlight
Cassandra’s Dream
Midnight in Paris
To Rome With Love
Whatever Works

(First two of those are classics; second two are among his most underrated; the final three are kind of bad.)

Blue Jasmine is the only one of those I'd ever not warn people away from.

seen five, three meh and two loathsome (VCB and To Rome With Love)

Blue Jasmine is the only one of those I'd ever not warn people away from.

Yikes, you are a glutton for punishment if you watch all 10 of these films and only could tolerate one of them.

I think most Woody Allen recommendations these days come with the implied caveat that you have to be able to stomach Woody Allen movies into order to enjoy them—Match Point and Blue Jasmine would be the only ones I'd recommend to people who don't care for Allen. I do think Scoop was a delightful trifle, though, and Tall Dark Stranger (which I seriously think a lot of people avoided because of its dreadful poster art) had something genuinely new/interesting insights into the nature of happiness.

Midnight in Paris is the one that confounds me. It's essentially the same disposable movie Allen makes most years, yet for some reason the world really rallied around it.

it was p stupid. I liked the conceit of everyone longing for a past age, including the people in the age the protagonist is longing for, but beyond that ... no joeks, no characters, aimless = ie his usual problems these days

https://jackieohohoh.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/midnight-in-paris-dalc3ad.gif

In that (really good) documentary Allen explains that he just makes movies, and essentially doesn't know which will be good ones or which will be bad and which will be liked or not. And I feel like Midnight in Paris is one he might have done differently if he'd known people would take to it so much, since the jokes were thin and the women characters were soooooo bad. Just a quick rewrite or two could have fixed those problems, but I don't think Allen's process usually involves sweating details

you're assuming he can still spot thin jokes or shallow female characters anymore!

^^^

he dgaf. at this point his output is more like a tic or a pathology than a genuinely creative act.

xxp I think he can, but film making has become such a rote exercise for him that he just doesn't always hit the target.

Jokes are hard, because comedy is subjective and sometimes the muse doesn't strike and all that, but the guy has been a screenwriter for decades. One collaborator saying "hey Woody, the female lead here exists only to be a drag on Owen Wilson and to stand in the way of his dreams; think you could maybe flesh her out and give her redeeming qualities and goals and ambitions of her own?" is all it would have took to fix the Rachel McAdams character

his Beat Generation jokes were shorter and sharper in 1964

Watching Magic In The Moonlight...Emma Stone's hats are walking away with this thing.

kind of bummed he'll likely die making some shitty tv show rather than cranking out a movie every year

kinda psyched he'll likely die soon

XP He's got another film ready for 2015, with Stone, Joaquin Phoenix and Parker Posey.

Logline:

On a small town college campus, a philosophy professor in existential crisis gives his life new purpose when he enters into a relationship with his student.

Oh Woodypaws, you'll never learn!

Posted this on the Cannes thread, but it's a good extended interview:

http://deadline.com/2015/05/woody-allen-cannes-interview-irrational-man-1201427066/

" I don’t own a word processor."

I’ve had more than my share of opportunity over the decades to do something great, to break new ground, to find a new form, to electrify, to really stun people. After a while I had to realize, well, wait a minute, nobody’s stopping me. I mean, go ahead and do it. You can do anything you want to. You can have a blank screen for an hour and a half in the movie house if you wanted; you’re the boss. And then I start to think the reason it is not coming is that you can’t do it. You don’t have it in you.

^^^ from 1986

the one that year wasn't bad

could be the new one is best for fans of Parker Posey and Emma Stone

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/review-irrational-man-woody-allen

“I started the relationship with her and I thought it would just be a fling.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/07/woody-allen-soon-yi-previn

"I was paternal,” he explains. “She responded to someone paternal. I liked her youth and energy. She deferred to me, and I was happy to give her an enormous amount of decision making just as a gift and let her take charge of so many things"

how deluded do you have to be to think this sounds like a reasonable defence and not utterly horrifying on every level?

http://www.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/humb.jpg

about yay far

narcissism is a common trait in child molesters

Well, Irrational Man was garbage, but I like pot-bellied Joaquin. Muy Joa-po.

conflation of a 20+ year marriage to SoonYi (however strange and dubious) and the kid-molestation charges continues to make me sad that some of you fuckers vote.

not conflating anything. Woody Allen is a child molester. Child molesters are often narcissistic. Woody Allen's description of his marriage to Soon-Yi suggests narcissism, which is wholly consistent with the entirely separate fact that he is a child molester.

oh, oh, you thought that when I called him a child molester I was referring to the fact that he married Soon-Yi! Sorry, I should have mentioned that he also molested a child.

glad we cleared that up

and I vote!

just ran the irrational man trailer (imagine the dogears these days on that 1975 copy of crime and punishment's cliff's notes) right after a trailer for a documentary on hiroshima; you can cut the bathos in here with a knife

Saw Irrational Man yesterday, it was fine - if you like Woody Allen I imagine you will like it. It's one of the Crime&Punishment plots, but the main character's arc is somewhat opposite Raskolnikov's which serves as variation. Joaquin Phoenix is good as disillusioned/cynical professor and Parker Posey was a pleasant surprise.

I saw it with a friend who's a programmer, after the film he asked me: "So how does all that philosophy and literature stuff hold up? 'Cause whenever I see depictions of coding in movies it's basically ridiculous". I told him I find it enjoyable even if it's all very superficial, and I think it works in Woody's movies.

If you're looking for nuanced conversation on Russian literature (or even just Dostojevski) or continental philosophy (or even just existentialism) you'll of course be disappointed - but I don't think Woody was ever very clever on those topics, and I don't think he's ever pretended to be, on the contrary I find his movies very unpretentious.

We were only five people in the theater, one was an old woman who after the movie struck up conversation - she was deeply moved by the ethical dilemmas and remembered having read C&P when she was young. I guess I was surprised anyone would take a movie like that so seriously, but we had a nice little conversation and I recommended she find a copy of Crimes & Misdemeanors.

I think Crimes & Misdemeanors is worth taking seriously, fwiw. I actually think that movie had a big effect on my thinking about a lot of things relating to my self-conception as a nice/good person.

Yeah, Allen does that. If you like even one of his films, you should probably reevaluate your niceness.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/woody-allen-might-have-fired-bruce-willis.html

man alive, I agree it's worth taking seriously, it made a pretty big impression on me the first time I saw it, but it's also miles from Irrational Man, which is - pardon the phrase - Woody "light".

But what makes C&D a good movie imo is not that it deals with a lot of clever theory, but that it's a good psychological drama with esp Landau and Huston delivering great performances

Can anyone recommend a Woody biography?

24 years old, but the last one i read

http://www.ericlax.net/books/woodyallen_bio.htm

cool, I'll check it out!

yeah, really enjoyed that - read it when I was a teenager, though it had the misfortune to be published at the exact moment that the soon-yi stuff surfaced iirc

I liked Marion Meade's 'The Unruly Life of Woody Allen', the focus is more on muckraking than analysis of his work, though it's not a total hatchet job.

there's an LRB article about the book here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n09/michael-wood/a-kind-of-slither

yeah my stomach couldnt take the unruly life

Meade makes no secret of the fact that she doesn't like the man, but the section on the split with Mia/Soon-Yi relationship/child abuse allegations was pretty diligently 'balanced', or that's how I remember it anyway. If anything she seems to dislike Mia Farrow even more, which maybe explains it.

this is excellent IMO; a Q+A type oral-history-and-chronological-interview-for-each-film deal, again more than a decade old

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Woody-Allen-Conversation-Stig-Bjorkman/dp/0571223176

this one has the longest interview with him about Manhattan i'd ever read. in light of him never doing Director's Commentary or same, i think it'll remain so.

looks very good! ordered it from the library