woody allen

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!

elaine may is almost 80!

She would know: Going out with Woody Allen was like being in a Woody Allen movie, Diane Keaton writes in an upcoming memoir. The Academy Award-winning actress starred with Allen in such favorites as Sleeper and Love and Death and got an Oscar for Annie Hall, in which her baggy-panted WASP meshed unforgettably with Allen’s patented schlemiel. Allen and Keaton dated for a few years and remain close.

“I was his endearing oaf. I had him pegged as a cross between a ‘White Thing’ and the cockroach you couldn’t kill,” Keaton, 65, writes in Then Again, which comes out next month and is excerpted in the November issue of Vogue, arriving at newsstands Oct 25. “We shared a love of torturing each other with our failures. His insights into my character were dead-on and hilarious. This bond remains the core of our friendship and, for me, love.”

Keaton writes that she met Allen in 1968 when they worked together in Allen’s stage comedy Play It Again, Sam, roles they re-enacted for the 1972 film version. Allen is the divorced neurotic who channels the spirit of Humphrey Bogart to help with his love life. The actress falls for him in the script and soon did the same in real life.

“How could I not? I was in love with him before I knew him. He was Woody Allen. Our entire family used to gather around the TV set and watch him on Johnny Carson. He was so hip, with his thick glasses and cool suits,” she writes. “But it was his manner that got me, his way of gesturing, his hands, his coughing and looking down in a self-deprecating way while he told jokes like ‘I couldn’t get a date for New Year’s Eve so I went home and I jumped naked into a vat of Roosevelt dimes.’

“He was even better-looking in real life. He had a great body, and he was physically very graceful.”

What do you think she means by "White Thing"?

I was hoping someone would know...

yep, Elaine May is old; she became famous over 50 years ago.

Rob: Imagine my surprise when I got your call, Max.
Alvy Singer: Yeah. I had the feeling that I got you at a bad moment. You know, I heard high-pitched squealing.
Rob: Twins, Max! 16 years-old. Can you imagine the mathematical possibilities?

Isaac Davis: She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father, can you believe that? I'm dating a girl, wherein, I can beat up her father.

Woody Allen has officially changed the name of his latest film from The Bop Decameron to Nero Fiddled. A rep for Allen confirmed to EW that he changed the title after realizing that the previous one was garnering befuddlement instead of excitment.

“I couldn’t believe how few people had heard of The Decameron even in Rome,” Allen said in a statement after shooting in Rome all summer. ”And the few that did assumed the movie was based on Boccaccio’s tales which it’s not.”

Allen will lead an impressive cast that also includes Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penélope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page. But despite the impressive all-star roster, Allen noted that the title-change was necessary to create some buzz for the film. “Anyhow, I changed the title to Nero Fiddled, which is the first time I’ve changed a title since my last minute switch of Anhedonia to Annie Hall,” he said

Eisenberg is such an Allen clone surprised it took him this long to cast him

I won't be seeing this

more like delameron

brett ratner produced a 4 hr doc on woody to air in 2 parts on pbs 11/20 & 21

http://collider.com/brett-ratner-tower-heist-oscars-interview/123682/

maybe he just had a cold but he doesn't look/sound too good in this clip

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

ya his voice is pretty rough

aw

man diane keaton was the prettiest

She was very! Hey, Tony Roberts. :) He used to work in my parents's old restaurant when he was a kid and was a customer for years as was his Dad Ken who was a famous radio announcer from back in the day. They were both awesome. I think Ken died a couple years ago iirc. /Suzy. Sorry.

"parents's"

oops

He was also in this gem: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102690/

i always think of him as "max" because he and allen call each other "max" in annie hall.

I C U AS AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN DIANE

i was going to say something unkind about how female insecurity must be how woody allen got all his chicks but tbh i think he is cute in annie hall.

It's been too long since I've seen AH. I think I'll watch it this weekend.

have you heard the quote from DK in her new memoir where she says he has "an incredible body" or something

huh

. . . of work?

o_O sometimes i think maybe diane keaton is her character in manhattan who describes wallace shawn as a sex god or whatever.

xxp lol

Diane Keaton's new memoir, Then Again, digs into the origin of her romance with Woody Allen lo those many years ago. "He had a great body," she writes. "I was in love with him before I knew him. He was Woody Allen ... He was so hip, with his thick glasses and cool suits." The two became friends during the 1968 production of Play It Again, Sam, when "Woody got used to me," Keaton says. "He couldn't help himself; he loved neurotic girls." Put that on a shirt, Urban Outfitters. She also non-admits admits that Annie Hall is about their romance.

that last sentence is not news

He was so hip, with his thick glasses

proto-ilxor looking dude

I'm sure this would have been posted on one of the many other Woody Allen threads, but just in case:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/woody-allen/about-the-documentary-film/1865/

Will definitely watch.

well the vid up there is from the show.

I saw Tony Roberts about 5 years ago in midtown, fittingly, on his phone.

so he's turning Bullets over Broadway into a stage musical.

i want to disapprove but who am i kidding i will save my pennies for that

Rosenbaum in 1990:

“Why are the French so crazy about Jerry Lewis?” is a recurring question posed by film buffs in the United States, but, sad to say, it is almost invariably asked rhetorically. When Dick Cavett tried it out several years ago on Jean-Luc Godard, one of Lewis’s biggest defenders, it quickly became apparent that Cavett had no interest in heating an answer, and he immediately changed the subject as soon as Godard began to provide one. Nevertheless it’s a question worth posing seriously, along with a few related ones — even at the risk of courting disbelief and giving offense.

Why are American intellectuals so contemptuous of Jerry Lewis and so crazy about Woody Allen? Apart from such obvious differences as the fact that Allen cites Kierkegaard and Lewis doesn’t, what is it that gives Allen such an exalted cultural status in this country, and Lewis virtually no cultural status at all? (Charlie Chaplin cited Schopenhauer in MONSIEUR VERDOUX, but surely that isn’t the reason why we continue to honor him.) If we agree that there’s more to intellectual legitimacy than name-dropping, what is it in Allen’s work as a comic Jewish writer-director-performer that earns him that legitimacy — a legitimacy that is denied to, among others, Elaine May and both Mel and Albert Brooks?

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=21337%EF%BB%BF

For me it might have something to do with the fact that I find Jerry Lewis movies unwatchable.

CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS offers another case in point. A film that professes to address the rampant amorality and self-interest of the 1980s gives us an ophthalmologist (Martin Landau) who arranges to murder his mistress and gets away with it and a socially concerned documentary filmmaker (Allen) who isn’t rewarded for his good intentions. But both characters seem equally motivated by self-interest, and we are asked to care much more about Allen’s character as a fall guy than about the murdered mistress (Anjelica Huston). Landau’s masochism about his initial feelings of guilt are matched by Allen’s masochism about being a loser. There is a lack of ironic distance on this aspect of both characters, and if the film is genuinely attacking self-interest, it is seriously handicapped by being unable to see beyond it.

I don't agree with this at all - I thought the point of the parallel stories was partly to question the goodness of the "loveable loser" -- Allen's character is shown to be petty and mean, and what separates him from his double seems come more from his lack of power than any supposed good intentions.

"of the 1980s"

piece was written at the conclusion of the '80s dawg

and that is the decade when the national "narrative" endorsed such a philosophy very shamelessly.

Yet Allen is often treated in the press as if he were even more important than (Bergman and Fellini).

haha was this really the case or is this just another vaguely dumb thing in this article? also is this guy like a respected critic and stuff, i'm very confused

At peak Woody respectability, say '86-92, it's not much of an overstatement.

A film that professes to address the rampant amorality and self-interest of the 1980s gives us an ophthalmologist (Martin Landau) who arranges to murder his mistress and gets away with it and a socially concerned documentary filmmaker (Allen) who isn’t rewarded for his good intentions. But both characters seem equally motivated by self-interest, and we are asked to care much more about Allen’s character as a fall guy than about the murdered mistress (Anjelica Huston).

i think this really misreads the movie tbh. Always thought Allen's self-interest is pretty clear.