The man’s a churner, he whips them out at a rate of knots. With his musical bent and love for wrapping old lips around things it’s easy to see Woody Allen as a rock star, albeit the wimpiest, smallest and most sensitive song-throttler of all time. Like the Bowies and Springsteens and Princes he turned out a run of genius through the dusty days of the early-seventies, an untouchable blast of creativity and genre-bumping that stands up and punches anything today and made his mark on a world he probably hates. He gets even better as the decade wears on, gets interesting and arty as the years of neon and Duran Duran kick in, then falls and sets fire to himself at the dawn of the nineties and well into the 2000s, rolling and screaming and trying to put the flames out as a few blind and deaf die-hards hail his latest packets of crap as ‘returns to form’.
There’s a few ways to draw spurious comparisons, but above all it’s his work rate. The man’s 77 and he’s still written two scripts in the time it took you to delete your browsing history, and one of them’s pretty good. It’s easy to see his films as songs; they’re only 90 minutes, baby bears in the land of Christopher Nolan, and as such some are going to be Higher Grounds and others are going to be Stevie Wonder’s Entire Recorded Output Since 1984. This blog thing here has gone into his main bulk of work in questionable levels of detail elsewhere, but these films, these ones coming up, they’re the B-Sides, the detours, the early demos and ones that film bloggers might forget to review because they’re not very good at their craft and have been on a slightly worrying Modafinol bender for the past eighteen months. Some of them are good! Some of them star Anthony Hopkins!
WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT?
Starring Peter O’Toole
M
TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN
Starring Woody Allen
Y
What a bastard, huh, starting both his earliest film titles with the word ‘What’s’. What’s up with that? Huh? What’s up with it? What’s… what’s that all about? Yeah? What’s…? What?
Both are fast and funny, though Pussycat never betters its opening gambit of Peter Sellers, Comedy Accent and Fat Woman, the holy trinity of giggling since time began. Watching them back to back gives a good idea of how Allen evolved the idea of comedy direction back in the sixties, with Take The Money and Run being a vaguely revolutionary mockumentary straight-faced natural-fest compared to Pussycat’shackneyed crazy-romping and constant bursts of Bacharach. On the plus side the earlier film does feature the insanely brilliant Romy Schneider burning up every scene she’s in like a big German sun that went supernova too soon, as well as Peter O’Toole playing a dashing Peter O’Toole who reveals unexpected laugh-along chops. Peter-fest is won by Sellers though, effortlessly inhabiting an insane wig wearing pervatistic psychiatrist called Dr. Fritz Fassbender who should really look like this.
It’s old, it’s dated, it stinks of a moth’s balls, but it does have some chuckles and an inspired live-action Mario Kart ending that involves lots of people crashing into bits of wood to a Burt-bopping soundtrack, so there’s that. Scriptwriter Woody’s barely noticeable in the frenzy though, and when he does show up it’s only to do that pervo-grin and grab that he perfected in the early sixties, an inconsequential turn in an easily forgettable farce.
Take the Money and Run’s a different kettle entirely, and all the better for being a break from the past. A proto-Zelig in the big orb of Allen, it represents the first time that Woody chose to direct a proper film himself rather than sit in a dark room and let the Japanese do all the heavy lifting, and he’s got a bit of a flair for it. Alternating between interview footage and a series of increasingly ridiculous criminal-based skits, his chuck-everything approach moves at a frightening rate of frames, so any gag that doesn’t pass mustard is forgotten and swiftly replaced with a shot of his parents wearing Groucho Marx masks, or someone tripping over something and smiling politely. As a template for better films it’s an interesting slice of history, but likeable with it, and as such it’s as indispensable as a gun made of soap; funny at first, but useless in the rain. He’ll do better, but he’ll damn well do worse…
YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER
Starring A Load of Old Shit
d
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS
Starring Owen Wilson
Y
An old man piss-stink tag team of nostalgic despair, if Woods drops dead tomorrow at least he’ll go out on one of the best of his weird little life, even though it’s prompted by one of his most humungerific failures. All human life is here, if you hate human life and love the past with the insane fervour that can only come from locking yourself in a Manhattan apartment for twenty five years with only a clarinet and a joke book for company. Stranger is probably one of the worst, most alarming films he’s ever coughed out, a meandering diatribe against the middle-classes that have served him so well, front ended by the second most depressing performance of Naomi Watts’ otherwise wicked career. Pockmarked with hatred and failure throughout, its tales of crap writers and liars and idiots and charlatans criss-cross each other endlessly, going nowhere and resulting in nothing, and that’s the whole point of the film. He’s finally made a movie where nothing means anything and there isn’t anything real to believe in, but forgotten to lighten it with any levity other than the briefest wistful shots of Frieda Pinto’s face and a bit of classic chav-acting from the usually-reliable Lucy Punch, the woman with the most punchable name in show-business. It cuts out at the end with no resolution and no redeeming features, a bizarre misery-fest that dives full pelt into the sea of aimless crap that he’s dipped his disgusting old toes in so many times before. It’s worse than Match Point! IT MAKES WHATEVER WORKS LOOK OK!
Midnight in Paris explains why. Woody hates so much now, he despises the modern world with such a huge catheter of quiet rage that he’s willing to produce a reasonably expensive film in the centre of London, wasting the precious time of Anthony Hopkins and anyone who paid money to see it, in order to show how mad he is, and then his next film strolls along down a 1920s Parisian boulevard with a Gauloise in its mouth, to explain what’s grabbed the man’s goat.
Give him the past and he’s as happy as a dog with a bucket of cats, and he’ll produce something delightful, something that’ll pluck us all out of this recession and drop us in a puddle of pure retro-happiness that we’ll slowly drown in. Midnight in Parisis a great film, it’s something simple and lovely from a man who’s had difficulty doing both recently, and it might be one of the best of his career. From the off we’re pounded with love, a slow succession of Parisian streets filmed with the same adoring eyes that once trailed Manhattan, then Owen Wilson turns up in the role of his life as Woody but prettier, a lost soul in a city he can finally call home. Whenever Allen lapsed into whimsy and the supernatural in his earlier films it came off wonderfully, from Love and Death’s reaper chats to Stardust Memories’ dalliance with the helium-aliens, but here he’s grown, matured. All it takes for Gil Pender to realise his fantasies is an old car and the stroke of midnight, a subtly that ranks with the best magical-realist narratives in its restraint and class.
From the time travel on we’re into Avengers Assemble for English lit students, a string of extended cameos by Hemingway, Stein and the Fitzgeralds all lovingly brought to life with a knowing wink by the likes of Tom ‘Mischief’ Hiddleton and Adrian Brody, playing a Dali so self obsessed that he spends half his screen time saying his own name. Special props here to Alison Pill as a Zelda Fitzgerald who’s ‘exactly like what we’ve read of her’ and Corey Stoll, playing Hemingway as a strong-armed, gilt edged poetic bastard, a man hewn from rock that beats up other rocks and leads Gil down the righteous path of artistic justice.
It’s not a terribly clever film, it doesn’t have much to say other than ‘stay put and find a winsome eighteen year old record store clerk’, but like Vicky Christina Barcelona it’s gorgeous to stare at and it has a few whimsical musings, like sitting in a café with thatFrench girl who used to be in the Renault adverts. Like many of his best he’s digging around in the past to find his missing optimism again, but here, played by pretty people and shot through with scene-wrenching cameos, he’s made a film that can be enjoyed by the masses outside of his usual three-blocks of Manhattan range, and as such it’s nearly up there with his A-team.
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM
Starring Woody Allen
Y
SOUNDS FROM A TOWN I LOVE
Starring New York, New York
D
Play It Again Sammy-Boy’s another anomaly: a Woody not directed by Woody, but still one of the quintessential works of the squinty one’s career, a pure shot of Allen that crams in a love triangle, an obsession with classic film and his first time verbally jiving with the ever-phenomenal Diane Keaton. Based on a play that must have been pretty good, Woody really settles into his role as himself for the first time here, showcasing the savant skill for prat falling and word-acrobatics that would keep him in prescription medicine and attractive wives for the next thirty years whilst barfing up an early part for Tony Roberts in his defining role as the deep-voiced, all round better best friend guy. The Casablanca allusions are skilfully thrown in throughout, some guy in a trench coat mounting a valiant attempt at Bogarting, whilst the ending triangle on the smoky airfield is almost as sad and effecting as the same scene nearly forty years earlier, but with less Nazis and more… well, crippling Jewish guilt. There are oddities; the action’s in San Francisco for some reason, and being directed by someone else means certain scenes seem off, with musical cues that don’t belong in Allen’s smoky world of jazz plink-plonking, as well as camera work that eschews his usual dual love for confined spaces and New York architecture. The result is a film that shows Allen’s genius for the first time in regards to dialogue, gurning and picking lead actresses, but feels like a more generic romantic comedy in terms of direction, as though Richard Curtis had travelled back in time in an attempt to destroy a comedy virtuoso to distract the world from The Boat That Rocked. He’s failed; the film’s a must-watch for any Allen aficionado or anyone who simply gives one about great cinema, a timeless neurotic classic that’ll stand for just a little less time than Bogart’s chain-smoking masterpiece itself.
Sounds From A Town I Love is charming, wit-stuffed, wonder-shot, laugh-aloud, full of insight and pitch-perfect dialogue, with a wizened expert and beautiful amateur’s understanding of New York and human nature. Its two minutes and fifty nine seconds long.
That’s it. He’s great, he’s shit, he’s stupid and he’s clever, like ninety nine percent of the planet.
But he’s made films! Take that, people who haven’t made films!
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