woody allen

woody made some excellent movies in the 90s... husbands & wives, manhattan murder mystery, everybody says i love you...

mighty aphrodite!

“The new film stars Alec Baldwin, Ellen Page, Jesse Eisenberg, Penélope Cruz, Judy Davis, Roberto Benigni, and myself,” he explained. “It’s a broad comedy of various interwoven tales

someone might be able to smack this down by naming an ensemble piece he made more recently that sucked - melinda & melinda? - but if this is anywhere close to deconstructing harry i can see it being a good thing, & it might be preferable seeing him dealing in vignettes, rather than seeing a single angle stretched to full length.

I can’t play the love interest anymore, and of course this is tremendously frustrating, because that’s really what I want to play. But that’s not as believable anymore

TRANSLATION: "I really wanna tap Juno, but I'll have to do through avatar Zuckerberg."

We have this argument every four years -- whenever Woody makes a film that doesn't inspire a public flogging.

Loved Scott and Zelda in "Midnight in Paris."

I have to say, having seen the "MiP" trailer, that I'm kind of loving Owen Wilson as the Woody surrogette.

He's great in it (though not nearly as dweebish as a true Woody-manqué) and I say that as someone who has never liked him in anything, ever.

there was an article about this in the NYT EVERY DAY last week. sheesh.

"sweet and lowdown" was the last WA i enjoyed

Can we say "best since Deconstructing Harry"?

I think we can, yeah. Although the tone is completely different. But the tone of Deconstructing Harry is different than any other Allen movie, IMO. This one is a lot more Purple Rose of Cairo. Owen Wilson is surprisingly great as the Allen stand-in. Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein is pitch-perfect casting. Adrian Brody as Salvador Dali is over the top, but what makes it work is that it's also not far off the mark. I think the scene where the Owen Wilson character pitches a movie idea to Luis Bunuel will be talked about for decades, at least in art and film schools. I won't give it away, but it's a genius gag.

Thinking about this the next day, and remembering how many big laughs are in it. Like Hemingway asking the coquettish young girl if she's ever shot a wild animal who was charging at her. As if the answer could possibly be "yes".

this was fun! and cute! his best in a while!

i like a lot of his more recent films, sweet and lowdown, match point, cassandra's dream; VCB was ok I guess but I preferred the others. this was excellent also, does seem to hearken back to the 80's; it's light, smart, funny. really good!

how old is Woody now? I was thinking, as it started, how like Bob Dylan he is; singular and never equalled, really the best as what he does.

think he's ten years older than b-dilly. and doesn't like him.

Woody was born 12/1/35

I've just recently pushed myself into the difficult 2000s period of my complete Woody Allen filmography watch-through. Small Time Crooks, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, and Anything Else...ugh. The latter two were just as limp as I'd been led to believe (although they contained the germs of better movies), but the first two were pretty much just bad. And were immediately preceded by Sweet and Lowdown! Which is definitely the last of his films that I loved. And then Melinda and Melinda was okay if not mind-blowing. So...what exactly happened to him during those four pictures he made at Dreamworks? Post-Bush and 9/11 malaise is only a valid scapegoat for half of that run. I'm looking forward to this last stretch, though, considering I've heard good things about at least half of his movies that I've yet to see. Oh, also: is Don't Drink The Water worth checking out?

P.S. I'm really looking forward to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF8pwbgTfPA

don't drink the water is a dumb clump of cliches that barely relate to each other but it is often hilarious. julie kavner's great; woody is in Tacky Mode, which is his better mode. there's a romantic subplot that is mgm-marx-level boring. it's shot with the husbands and wives shaky-cam for some reason. woody allen's total lack of interest in or knowledge of any kind of politics or history is a little more noticeable in a movie that takes place in an american embassy in the khrushchev-era ussr, but once you figure out the thing's a vaudeville cartoon you can forget about that. except possibly when some vague kind of middle eastern oil prince shows up traveling with an enormous harem of burqaed women who do nothing but ululate; that's pretty embarrassing. but yeah it's worth checking out.

there's some woody interview where he talks about one of the problems of the original play being that "we made it too funny" -- the audience's laughter wrecked the timing and made the underplotted play last forever.

This was clumsy. While Owen Wilson is by far the best Woody proxy cast yet, I didn't believe him for a second as a writer, even a third-rate one. Other than a funny gag involving Hemingway guzzling a bottle of wine and shouting, "Who wants to FIGHT?" and Adrien Brody as Dali, the actors playing the writers had to mouth a lot of the platitudes we most associate with them. Sharper dialogue would have made Kathy Bates an awesome Gertrude Stein, and Tom Hiddleston had the right profile if nothing else for Scott Fitzgerald.

Also: the Rachel McAdams half of the movie was spectacularly lame. I just have no patience anymore for Woody's hamhanded exposition (e.g. "Remember we have that private exhibit at the museum tonight. Paul is a Monet expert, you know").

There's no comparing this to "The Kugelmass Episode" or The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Wish he had made it more about the peripheral figures around Hemingway, Fitzgerald etc. rather than the writers themselves. When Belmonte showed up I thought it might head in that direction, but no.

"Kugelmass" is great. I was trying to remember the title of that story the entire second half of the movie.

Soto otm (except, Owen Wilson IS a screenwriter!).

I laughed twice, I think. Even among post-prime Woody, I'd take Small Time Crooks over this.

I've probably said it before itt, but VCB may have been a true classic if they'd just combined the two plots and made rebecca hall the one lead.

in owen wilson's defense no woody allen character written since he ran out of autobiography in 1991 is ever going to be buyable as a writer. still completely looking forward to seeing this though and almost went today.

i may have made up that year. whenever husbands & wives came out, after which he stopped putting details in his characters.

there are details in Deconstructing Harry! "First I want ya to tie me up, then beat me..."

(H&W was '92, DH '97)

Also: the Rachel McAdams half of the movie was spectacularly lame. I just have no patience anymore for Woody's hamhanded exposition (e.g. "Remember we have that private exhibit at the museum tonight. Paul is a Monet expert, you know").

― The Edge of Gloryhole (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, June 11, 2011 12:51 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

hah, yeah. i was cringing through most of that robotic characters-explaining-their-relationships-with-each-other dialogue (which begins the second the movie opens). hes just a spectacularly lazy writer now. and director.

anyway this was cute and not completely unwatchable so that makes it a cut above for the woodster these days

The Sidney Bechet was nice. I didn't know what the film was about going in but I figured it would have something like that.

xp to morbs: oh that's right! and it has the scene with mariel hemingway as the furious anti-woody-allen mom.

I think my favorite part of Midnight in Paris was the wife of douchebag professor who very hesitatingly...didn't really mispronounce french things, but was afraid she would. that woman was very very good at doing that, the two times she did it. so good I can't mimic it.

yeah the versailles gag was good

Midnight in Paris will be his biggest hit since 1986.

David Thomson on its badness:

Midnight in Paris is very far from the worst film Woody Allen has made in the last 300. He has a conventional prettifying tourist’s eye for the great city. He pursues his old wintry habit of collecting attractive girls and then abandoning them—cast cute but then never give them real scenes, let alone emotions. He has a promising misunderstanding over a pair of earrings, but then tidies it away as if it’s going to require too much work. And the 75-year-old continues to survey his own pictures like a 22-year-old who is superior, lazy, and chronically immature. So the game is played, but no one cares—least of all Allen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvVbSxEZlDA

Even though IT IS WRITTEN that Eisenberg will play ^^^ in the next one, here's to hoping it's really Ellen Page.

oh boy -- the next one is titled The Bop Decameron.

(bop as in bebop, I'm guessing)

this movie is great but how hard would you have laughed if the credits had kicked open with
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs3xXlXSOKk
huge missed opportunity

Ah, goldmine! This is what I was looking for when I started the other thread. Thanks, guys.

we should keep midnight in paris discussion to the new thread, that way if someone wants to talk about midnight in paris it he future they dont have to find this

Woody's Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris thread

with the emperor out of the way, all that remains is to kill don francisco. that will destroy his highness' stupid dreams of a treaty with spain! then i'll sail to austria, and form an alliance with the crown. not the king. just the crown.

Standup Comic: http://www.ibras.dk/comedy/allen.htm

so, he wrote another one-act comedy, as did Elaine May and Ethan Coen, and the reviews are mixed:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/ethan-coen-elaine-may-and-woody-allens-relatively-speaking

Tempted to scrounge up the dough, as an actor acquaintance is in two of them. Also: Richard Libertini! Julie Kavner! Marlo Thomas! GUTTENBERG!

I saw some interview he gave about this in the NYT and as usual his answers contained more funny jokes than his last 2 dozen movies

which just made me sad

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/theater/elaine-may-interviews-ethan-coen-and-woody-allen.html

Well, the play is sposed to be pure farce (w/ echoes of SoonYiGate) so perhaps it's worthy.

That's not really an interview so much as straight-up shticklach.

that interview is terrible, so desperate and unfunny :(

idk I thought it was p good

s1ocki, phaps you just don't like Jewish humor!