WHAT'S UP TIGER LILY?

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Tatsuya Mihashi

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  He’s killed Larry David, given Penelope Cruz an Oscar for a disintegrating mind, made Colin Farrell cry tears of inadequacy and had Ian McShane sit on a fake boat. He’s talked duality and sexual dysfunction endlessly, whilst essaying his own decaying talent in the broadest strokes of comedy imaginable. There’s been crap, and more crap, and jazz guitar and crap again and an attempt to deconstruct himself that’s ended in a heart attack and a whore and Billy Crystal stoking the coals as Satan. He’s tried a musical with people who can’t sing. He’s done Greek Tragedy in central Manhattan. He’s terrible. He’s brilliant. He’s tried to rekindle old romance, got divorced, run from a man with an awesome chokehold and given drugs to a damaged wife. He loves Russian literature, and women. There are sad memories, and happy ones, weird performances and weird characters, while he’s sucked helium and blacked up, all in the name of comedy. His earlier ones are better. There’s sex there, and failure, with love and despair and love again, all filmed with a master’s eye and a romantic’s heart. He’s taken on sacred cows and tripped over giant banana skins, he’s been a sperm and caused a revolution. His first film consists of two 1960s Japanese action movies jammed together with the audio track ripped out, while he and a group of friends sit around smoking pot and making up funny things for the actors to say. It’s about egg salad, and the main character shouts ‘SARACEN DOG!’ a lot. Woody Allen is every kid pissing about on YouTube today, he’s a genius and an auteur and the world’s lucky to have him. 

BANANAS

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen

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  Perhaps more than any other genre with the exception of racist 1950s Disney cartoons,  comedy dates. It’s not all-encompassing. Slapstick lives forever – laughing at other people’s misery or lack of resistance to errant banana skins is a joy that’ll continue right up until the last of us crawls out of the pod and switches on the view screen implanted between our eyes. Likewise, the objects of a good satire – amazingly, nearly fifty years on, a lot of our dumb-bone planet is still dwelling under the greasy thumbs of several dictators and madmen in military clobber, so Woody joshing against the rule of a group of numb nuts with guns is still relevant and chucklesome, if a little sad for the lack of a utopia. What really groins the film is the timing, the rhythm and cadence of its patter. More than any other film here Bananas shows its age; it’s there in the length of scenes and postponement of punchlines, the music that flairs up across yet another interminable montage reminiscent of the one they dump into EVERY SINGLE SIMPSONS EPISODE FROM 2002 ONWARDS. If it ain’t funny now, it weren’t funny then. The piece is notable for kicking off many of Allen’s later themes and characters, from the neurotic Jew desperate to find a place for himself, to the neurotic Jew railing against the system with some clever quips, to the neurotic Jew struggling to force his way into an artistic girl’s underwear. It’s proto-Allen, shaky and dated, worth watching for only a few elements: Louise Lasser, the least remembered and most underrated of all his actresses, this bit, and the court room scene, an extended early masterclass in fucking about. From the jury getting high to the depiction of J. Edgar Hoover as a middle-aged black woman, it’s a joy from beginning to end, and highly worthy of a quick watch when you’ve a free four minutes. 

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK)

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Gene Wilder

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  Oh come on, Willy Wonka has a lasting and tender relationship with a sheep. That’s got to count for something. Essentially a sketch show dragged out to mythic proportions, the cavalcade of sexual whimsy starts with Woody bobbing a stick with a model of his own head stuck to the end, dressed as the fool in a BBC afternoon play circa 1976. It’s a bit rubbish, chastity belt tomfoolery notwithstanding. Luckily there’s another one a few minutes away, and the further on they get the harder they’ll make your tonsils shake. Fellini gets pinioned with a penis in Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching An Orgasm?, whilst the 1950s panel show What’s My Line gets a semen-stuffed update in What Are Sex Perverts?, featuring Regis Philbin asking if a flasher is ‘self-contained’ and an elderly Jewish lady chewing pork directly at the camera. The film builds to a shuddering climax and disappointing pillow-talk cigarette with Are The Findings of Doctors and Clinics Who Do Sexual Research and Experiments Accurate?  and What Happens During Ejaculation? respectively, blowing its wad with the former; the sketch gets increasingly deranged in a brilliant way, perhaps the most absurd and puerile thing that Allen had produced until Curse of the Jade Scorpion, which was stoopid for a whole different set of reasons. There’s nothing profound here, no great dark truth to his cackle like he’d go on to find, but it’s all the more amusing for it. It’s tit jokes and cross dressing and wanking. But a lot of it’s funny, and the last sketch features Burt Reynolds as the systems operator of a man’s libido, living in his head and telling him how to fuck. JUST LIKE EVERY MAN IN REAL LIFE. 

SLEEPER

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton

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Funny

Funny

Funny

Funny

FUNNY

LOVE AND DEATH

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton

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  There’s a reason Love and Death is Woody Allen’s funniest film, and it’s not because of Russian literature. Ridiculous facial hair aside, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy weren’t exactly known for shattering funny bones or running into things, so a film that sets out to show up their pomposity should be good for a laugh, at least for the eight people alive who still regularly read their books. So yeah – it’s a little limited in it’s lampooning, but the slapstick and general lunacy is as appealing as it ever was. Making paedo faces at a huge titted countess is immortal, as is repeatedly jamming your scabbard into an elderly opera goer. So are people who stink of fish, balls, and cheerleaders during the Napoleonic Wars. Love and Death is the funniest because it serves as a near perfect mixture of everything that concerns Allen and the ideas he does well; many different types of rib-tickling are seen here, from sight gags to riffing to shooting yourself in the shoulder. The philosophical undertones are both respected and exposed as nonsense in a series of increasingly meaningless discussions, whilst Diane Keaton throws up another expert performance in a parallel storyline all her own as she faces down elderly husbands, ugly violinists and a preoccupation with rented families, frequently stealing the film from under Woody’s nose and running off with it into through a field of gently wafting wheat. There’s the fearless sense of a man ripping the piss out of something he genuinely loves, whilst the scope and depth underneath make for perhaps the world’s first epic comedy, a baton that hadn’t even been touched until Evan Almighty grabbed it forty two years later before proceeding to cram it down its own throat. The throat of a film. It choked itself, it… alright, that’s not a good joke. It doesn’t make sense, it’s oblique, it’s stupid and pointless and poorly structured. All of which are the exact opposite of what Allen’s accomplished here, in one of the finest comedies of all time. And that’s why he’s still regarded as a genius nearly fifty years later whilst this review has limped to a disjointed and disappointing conclusion. 

ANNIE HALL

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton

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  The stick-out then, the show-off. When he’s carted into his grave and the sands of an uncaring future-desert swarm over his earth and memory, when the last tombs of emperors a thousand years hence have caved in and bubbled under the fissures of a collapsing solar system, there’ll still be someone out there with a DVD of Woody Allen’s first ‘grown up’ one, and they’ll still think the bit with the lobsters is cute. Often chucked about as the template for all modern romantic comedies, Annie Hall wins above everything else by simply nailing the first hurdle, the test that so many others have drastically fucked up since; it makes you care about both sides of the couple, it makes them real, interesting people with wants and needs and funny lines about living under rollercoasters. Time hasn’t ruined it, and if anything the string of no-hope copy works and lickspittles that have come along since have bolstered its greatness, an example of something done right that Allen has never really pulled off again. The jokes all work, the jumping about in time is inspired and every character leaves their mark, even Paul Simon’s hilariously drab and underplayed record producer and Shelly Duvall’s physically terrifying rock reporter. Everything clicks, but it clicks on the solid foundations of it’s central relationship; watching Allen and Keaton together is one of cinema’s greatest pleasures, and something that we should be grateful even happened a few times. He’s brilliant, as he often is, but she’s every bit his equal and frequently his better, giving Annie a humanity and humility that’s often lacking from his own neurotic personas. The subtitled scene on the rooftop is the standout, but anyone who’s ever sobbingly pounded their face into a pillow over another face will sympathise with Annie’s late-night spider call or the film’s central message of fleeting happiness. Despite it’s tangents into fantasy and fourth wall smacking the whole thing works so well because it’s real, because it expertly paints the early bliss, gradual decline and sad realizations of real life love, as well as the hope and happiness that you can draw from it. The style will fade, the revolutions in narrative already left to history’s dumpster, but the film will stand forever as a celluloid letter to love itself, just like Annie and Alvy will sit in each other’s memories, reading death books and laughing and picking lobsters off a kitchen floor.

INTERIORS

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Diane Keaton

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  Shambling pessimism and deep-seated psychological problems take centre stage for the first time in the only film on this list that could be construed as a straight up face-fucking horror movie. The early scenes are disjointed and confusing, the strength of the performances making up for a tangled narrative that barely holds together in a sea of beige rooms and oddly-shaped vases, nervy motions and emotional outbursts. The whole thing groans along like a sick fever dream version of Hannah and Her Sisters, the actresses at the core of the story spitting feathers at each other and building their rage and loss, culminating in a final act that’s sparse, claustrophobic and by far the darkest work of Allen’s career. In truth it’s based around the exact same themes as everything else he’s put his name to: nature vs. intelligence, feelings against thoughts, but here they’re all brought to the surface by the performances of Geraldine Page and Maureen Stapleton, the first as a lost, confused woman on the edge of death, the other a vibrant and seemingly simple old bag of fun. Together they embody the battles that rage throughout the dialogue and long glances, the icy camerawork and extended silences. Allen has never really been able to reconcile his clear love for the vibrancy and spontaneity that life can bring with his entrenched existential dread, but he’s never shown the divide as clearly as the scene where Joey, the middle daughter, watches her new step mother dance alone in the living room of their family home. The eyes behind those frames, the fingers clasped tight around the wine glass show everything that the little nerdy kid ever saw looking at others, separated by windows and walls from the interiors of life that he could never stay with. It’s a master class, and for pure, seeping dread he’s never really bettered it. By the end, when the waves shudder and roll towards the beach house, you’ll be left there shaking and cold, wondering how in God’s name this disturbed man ever made Small Time Crooks. A great film, a horrible film.

Oh. I forgot about Small Time Crooks.

SMALL TIME CROOKS

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen and Tracy Ullman

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I remember why I forgot it.

MANHATTAN

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen

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  Finally, a masterpiece. Everything that’s been attempted and fudged and chipped away at in all the other films on this list presses into a cohesive whole, a stunning, twisting experience that rewards repeated viewings and amazes on nearly every frame. Firstly, the surface stuff: the soundtrack is incredible. Using Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue gives a weight and elegance to the plot that elevates it to the golden years of Hollywood, whilst filming in black and white here delivers a sense of timelessness attempted but failed in other stuffing like Broadway Danny Rose or Celebrity. The cinematography across the board is incredible, from the iconic shot of the Brooklyn Bridge to an exchange within an astral observatory, all stars and silhouettes and some of the most sublime dialogue ever written by a twitchy, nervous man. Most of Allen’s films fall into easy camps of ‘funny’ or ‘deep’, but here, perhaps for the only time, he skips a perfect line between the two, mixing real pathos with a reined in version of his usual yammerings; not a scene goes on too long or doesn’t develop the story or characters, whilst the usual collection of intellectuals and artistic lost souls are drummed up to the giddy heights of real people you could meet on the street and wonder how they survive. The women are again the standouts, from Diane Keaton’s about face from her other roles as a difficult, sometimes unlikeable foil for Woody’s neuroses to Mariel Hemingway’s brutally fresh take on a naïve young girl who sums up Allen’s whole career in her final line. There’s a confidence here missing from a lot of his work before and since, a sense that he’s telling the story he wants to tell free of inhibition or outside influence save his own heroes, a fusing of the timelessness of Annie Hall with the more sombre nature of much of his later work. As aesthetically pleasing as Zelig, deeper and more satisfying than his later essays on human weakness and obsession, it serves as a mature partner to Annie and Alvy’s rambling, a grown up in a sea of hyperactive children. If you’re only going to watch one Woody Allen movie, watch Annie Hall. It’s funnier. But if you want something beautiful, thoughtful and black and white, then Manhattan beats the rest in a pinch.

STARDUST MEMORIES

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring WOODY ALLEN, even more so than usual

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  Yeah Yeah Yeah, we don’t believe you. Your whole life’s an act, you’re a compulsive liar/masturbator and your hair makes a weird triangle shape that distracts us when you deliver your soliloquies. This isn’t autobiographical? All these memories? Stardust Memories? Everybody back up, there’s a truck full of bullshit flashing its lights. Stardust Memories is another whirling dervish clusterfuck searching for answers in a bastard world, but this time Woody slows the camera down at certain points and catches the beauty that he’s missing by spending all his time up there in the brain. The lingering shot of Charlotte Rampling towards the end is the clincher, but before that we have aliens, gun smoke, ugly fans and Tony Roberts’ drawl to lead us gently through another essay on how unhappy the director is, each deviation more entertaining than the last. It’s a film that strips away the flimsy layers of a man living his life in the public gaze, from the indifference of his fellows to the passion of his lovers, revealing a scared little boy underneath who’s desperately trying to find his place in a world he doesn’t really understand, but has written endless one-liners about in an effort to stoke the void. What chucks this out from a lot of Allen’s other work is the strength of the images he puts forward, in many cases drawn from the lessons learnt watching Fellini films in a black room with no one else but his squealing ego. The opening train scene, all silent screams and drooling emptiness is a masterpiece in meta-upon-meta-upon-meta commentary, almost making you wish you could watch the film that his pretentious persona had produced (hint: you can.), whilst the latter relationship tangles carry an aloofness and dedication to imagination rather than love that distance the piece from his more gushy effusions. It’s another film about art and the point of it all. It’s very, very clever and it knows more than you do, but its letting you see its crib sheets and helping you through the algorithms. It bears repeated watching. It’s fifty-eight light years away from Whatever Works, and damning evidence of how a human mind can degrade over a few decades. Watch it and weep.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring A Picturesque Countryside

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  Mary STEENBURGEN’S voice occasionally BREAKS mid sentence. It HOPS and SKIPS about like a gazelle PUMPED full of speed and thus DISTRACTS YOU FROM THE REST OF THE FILM GOING ON AROUND IT. Luckily Woody’s being a try-hard again, making up for the loss of his kooky-clothed muse by casting Mia Farrow as a wafty waif women for the first time and running full pelt at a fairy tale stuffed with flying machines, red wine and jaunts through a scenic countryside. Many of Allen’s films use New York itself as a character, and it’s heartening to see that he can switch his skill set to another location and use it just as well; the trees and sunlight-dappled stream banks here are the fluid heart of the story, the nature that the poets and philosophers espouse pushed to the fore and used to luxurious effect. The script’s all sex and death again, but the setting refreshes the words, whilst the performances are all uniformly winsome and wondering. It’s delightful. In truth it’s a little too nice, and you might find yourself dropping off during the middle as the umpteenth romantic complication continues to run in circles and make itself sick. Closest to Vicky Christina Barcelona in tone, the scenic vistas and babbling brooks mask a drunken bitch-fight on the nature of reality, but this time he’s a happy little muffin instead of a leering old man and everything comes together in a cheery bubble of satisfaction. Woody’s on the form of his life at this point, so he’s allowed a madcap weekend in the country that doesn’t achieve much but smells of daisies all the same. Lovely.

ZELIG

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Leonard Zelig

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  Taking the opening newsreel of Citizen Kane and dragging it out to film-length is a gamble, but Woody’s rolled some snake eyes and he’s riding off in a Cadillac made of solid dollars. Stylistically, Zelig sits in the Allen Canon (presumably a small tube with an ‘INADAQUACY!’ flag hanging out the end of it) as another amazing anomaly like Shadows and Fog: it’s certainly as daring in its cinematography, which perfectly captures the strange fascination we have for old footage and dares to use it for the twisted obsessions of its author’s brain. Zelig is a film with something to say, and it says it in a compelling and entertaining way. It’s funny, it’s moving, it’s sad and stupid and clever and it twists like a barber shop spiral in a typhoon. Primarily concerned with identity, how it shapes both the individual and the world around them, the life story of Leonard Zelig is the story of the modern world packed into the body of small, wirey man. Over the course of his life the film takes in war, celebrity, money, comedy, race, class, music, love, death and jazz, a proto- Forrest Gump with more wit and tenderness shot through it than Tom Hanks’ entire gurning career. Yet another one of Allen’s pet obsessions writ large, its final stroke of genius is to entice real-world commentators and philosophers to gabble on about its knockabout trawl through history, with Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow and someone called, brilliantly, Bricktop all chuckling along and reminiscing about a man who didn’t exist in more ways than one.  Funny, breezy and thoughtful, it’s one of his deepest and most enjoyable works so far, worth as many watches as the number of personalities he tosses out.

BROADWAY DANNY ROSE

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen and Mia Farrow

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  More water treading, but at least it’s got some nice character work. Mia Farrow initially drowns as a miscast gangster’s moll (remember, this is the woman who was duped by a nice old lady into carrying the Chuckie Finster from hell), but gradually her performance grows on you as one of Allen’s usual genre subversions; only in one of his films could the tough gal be played by one of the meekest actresses in the known universe. Allen himself stomps through as the film history’s only sympathetic entertainment agent, a man who invites blind people and talking birds to his thanksgiving dinners when he really has very little to be thankful for. It’s not really a comment on anything, but unlike Purple Rose of Cairo it doesn’t really have much to build on; it’s just another one of those weird late 70s movies where an odd couple ends up in a ditch bickering before falling in love with each other, like Smokey and the Bandit if Burt Reynolds was a Jewish neurotic instead of the throbbing physical embodiment of pure manhood that he’s always been.

Thankfully it doesn’t really need any depth; as one of Allen’s purest romp-type-things its blocks ahead of Scoop or Don’t Drink the Water, whilst featuring two scenes guaranteed to raise a smile even from someone who had to watch Whatever Works and Cassandra’s Dream in the same week: a mishap with some helium, and this song. 

THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Jeff Daniels

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 Run time’s a largely undervalued commodity in film appreciation, which is odd because it’s the exact time the cancer will spend eating at your brain, or the period it takes for the dog to bite your electrical cables back home and burn the living room down. It’s pretty essential to the experience, and Woody does it well. Most every film here is about an hour and a half long, and sometimes it’s a blessing, sometimes it’s a curse, and sometimes it’s like acceptable porridge. In a lot of his pieces Allen is a breezy, lightweight filmmaker, content to take the simple entertainment that personified the films of his youth and transplant them into modern day settings. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Midnight in Paris works because it’s The Avengers for people who eat hummus, whilst Everyone Says I Love You is a drunken scrawl on the back of a napkin that’s lucky to be on DVD. Neither could grab your attention for much over the 90 minute mark, but then again, they don’t try to, and everything’s fine. However, some of his ideas, like The Purple Rose of Cairo, deserve more than he gives them. The comedy potential of film-characters chatting to the audience is squandered here in favour of a simple romance/paranoid delusion, with a likeable Jeff Daniels doing his best to make us care about a character who’s literally not much of a character to begin with. Allen never really gets his priorities as a storyteller straight, resulting in something that you crave more out of from almost the very beginning; the usual illusions of art and life are addressed here, but left to hang in a big old meta-mess of escapism. It’s frequently charming and lovely to look at, with an amazing attention to period detail and the nicked cinematography of early film, but ultimately it suffers the same fate as Hollywood Ending did when taking the piss out of its useless director; the reversion to escapism rather than analysis is very clever, but also unsatisfying. The guy can fuck up, but he can’t play dumb.

HANNAH AND HER SISTERS

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring a Wide Variety of 1980s Allen Regulars and Michael Caine

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  He can write for women, and that’s a rarity. Every one of the sisters here is developed into a character with wants, needs, loves and motivations, a plentiful inner-life and enough witticisms on the surface to fit with Allen’s other work. It’s the men here that are at odds with a great film. Most of the conversation scenes take place in a kitchen between two women with problems that swirl around in their heads, but they’re utterly riveting and attention grabbing, skirting a line between realism and artifice that’s masterful in its handling. But then, over the top, is a jerk-about comedy concerning Woody getting a brain tumour and worrying about the universe yet again. It’s funny. His act is usually funny, but here it’s out of place, and every time he appears again to whinge at a doctor and rant at the Old Testament you wish he’d get back to his nuanced and beautiful portrayal of women on the edge. It’s jarring, slamming his two functions together and skipping them from scene to scene. And then there’s Michael Caine, a man who long ago became a caricature of himself in the Ben Kingsley/Anthony Hopkins model, an ‘actor’ who’s content to only ever turn up and ‘be himself’, like a lonely kid on his first day of school. Thankfully, this is before his last great performance (this, if you’re interested), so he’s still putting some effort in and it’s… fucked up. He’s such a strange character, such an odd, dithering mess of neuroses and self-obsession that he comes across as Woody’s sociopathic doppelganger, a man who wants to weasel his way to a full existence by stalking women through dilapidated bookshops and fucking their sisters. It’s an amazing turn, but one that’s so off-kilter in comparison to the expert naturalism of the three sisters that when you put it next to Woody and the suicidal German artist it unbalances the film, sending it into a flume of stylistic confusion. That the piece as a whole is good enough to escape this weirdness is a testament to the strength of it’s direction and the acting of the main actresses, each of whom create a likeable character with real flaws and endearing qualities that see them through the bizarre sabotage-performances of the men around them. Still, amazingly, one of his best.

RADIO DAYS

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Lil’ Scotty Evil

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  14. It’s scientifically proven. 14 is the number of acceptable, enjoyable movies you have to make before you can produce a selection of clips about your childhood and present it to producers as some form of entertainment to be sold, clips without the sniff of a plot and only the broadest of caricatures to hold the bits together. Like memory it’s a sensory experience; anecdotes float and churn, mixing fiction with fact and a healthy overlay of cultural waypoints, from War of the Worlds to The Shadow, Glen Miller to The Flight of the Bumblebee. Essentially it’s Uncle Woody sitting you down at the buffet and forcing his childhood on you, but he’s got balloons tied to his face and his arms keep spasming and knocking the salmon over; it’s fun. Not funny, not always, but fun, with a coal engine of warmth and a vat of one liners held back from his other pictures, some clearly drawn from real life. It’s certainly one of his easiest films to love, so suffused with happy memories and sing songs that you wonder how the man who came to make it ended up spending his entire life in therapy as well as producing endless pieces about his churning, eternal depression. Then halfway through it hits you; the family and assembled peoples of the film huddle around their radios, glued to the story of Polly Phelps, a girl who fell down a Pennsylvania well, and she dies, and another childhood ends. You see how deeply this director feels things, how his calculations and endless homages hide an emotion that dates back to his earliest days. It’s a glaring tack of reality in a corkboard stuffed full of fun, but it’s the memory that sticks out farthest, giving some heft to an otherwise fluffy photo album. But it’s beautifully shot, it features a tiny Seth Green and it’s LOVELY.

SEPTEMBER

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest

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Plays aren’t films,

They’re all slow,

I’ve never seen Othello,

And I’d love to continue with my song about this but,

I can’t rhyme ‘extortionate’.

  Good job, popular children’s rhyme; plays aren’t films, and films aren’t plays neither. Measured, quiet, contained and ridiculously expensive, the world of the theatre generally relies on intimacy and immediacy to get its kicks, unless you’re Andrew Lloyd Webber and the entire West End looks like a gigantic set of udders poking into the sky above London. In a career littered with failure it’s nice to see the Woods succeed where so many others have burned, namely by cramming the directness and claustrophobia of a great stage play into a film and not having you bored dead by where the interval should sit. Like its main character September is a quiet one, focusing on a central mother-daughter relationship that’s simultaneously both nuanced and lumbered with a ludicrous twist, whilst the other visitors to its isolated country house are all deliciously fucked up in various other ways. There’s the Allen staples of a failed writer and loveable gangster, as well as Denholm Elliot playing an elderly version of Charlie Brown’s unrequited love. All are sweet as a wollipop, but the best of the bunch is Dianne Wiest, turning in her best performance for Allen as a conflicted friend sick of the burden of a difficult soulmate. There’s an overbearing sense of time and weariness to the proceedings; everyone here is trapped in an endless weekend of last chances and attempts to recapture lost youth, which may seem an odd treatise for a man barely into his forties. Unlike a lot of his work the piece thrives on the restraints of setting, with each actor given a chance to Oscar-grope and the director allowed to linger around the corners of the house. By the end you feel like you’re trapped in the larder, watching these people’s lives break down as you silently steal their good cheese like a culturally indulgent mouse with a borderline sociopathic interest in other people’s suffering. Perfectly paced, brilliantly acted and sometimes unbearably sad, it flicks past Allen’s sometimes distanced approach to reveal him as a human being, with sweat and tears and emptiness.

ANOTHER WOMAN

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Gena Rowlands

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A gentle amble through one woman’s mind, it’s quiet, reflective and possibly the beigest film ever made. Not the highest quality piece of work, but notable for the strength of its central role, Gena Rowlands playing a complicated, outwardly cold woman past the best opportunities of her life with both a dignity and desperation that are endearing to see. There aren’t a lot of movies doing the rounds like this; even the current small crop of indie films that dare to try something other than crashing cars or cracking wise tend to focus on the youth of the western world, so seeing an intelligent rumination on an aging woman’s feelings seem more alien than Avatar could ever hope to be. Yes, it’s another example of Allen’s favourite genre of upper-middle-class New Yorkers smiling but eventually telling each other how rubbish they are, but it’s always absorbing, well-pitched and interesting, making the run-time fly by and putting coins in the respect jar. His attention to Hollywood royalty deserves a pat on the glasses; name ten other great roles for aging actresses in the last twenty years and you can win this. Or this. Only one of them is real.

CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Martin Landau and Woody Allen

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Why does it keep going back to Melinda and Melinda? That film was a pit full of spikes tipped with liquid rubbish, daring you to find anything decent within its bags of crap acting and desperate attempts at any kind of insight whatsoever. But there’s DNA there, a template buried under the crud that many of Allen’s other films reference or return to; strong women, detailed relationships, the fleeting farce of fate. Alliteration. Melinda and Melinda’s main shtick was the idea of a life divided into comedy and tragedy, but it dressed it like a child in a bin bag and left it to rot and fester under a script marched on by a moron carnival. Crimes and Misdmeanours, filmed over ten years earlier, is better. It’s the McFly to Melinda’s Busted, the Ali G to the later work’s Lee Nelson. The captain man from Space 1999 plays a complete bastard murder-orderer, but he does it with a conflicted brow and series of monologues and facial twitches that make you actually THINK ABOUT THINGS, about consequences, and passion and avoiding the distractions of 1980s fashion. Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline handled with 86% more subtletly than Melinda Woody himself grapples with his own shortcomings, questioning whether the end can ever justify the means and if he can get his little intellectual stick into Mia Farrow again. An attempt to drag the big questions of his beloved Russian novels into his own circle-jerk of navel-gazing, it generally works, if falling into preposterouness from frame to frame. For once Allen’s crutch of humour doesn’t detract from the serious central point, instead providing freedom from the claustrophobic nature of Landau’s storyline, whilst the conclusions it reaches reveal the sadness that clog the decisions that everyone makes. When he’s attempted to make grand statements before he’s tripped into aloofness, but here Allen keeps a steady keel and a compelling examination down to the final beats of another excellent soundtrack. When he’s on, he’s on.

ALICE

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Mia Farrow

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Vaguely interesting magical-realism thing with a bit of flying and invisible cab-riding. If you’re watching it at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon after a month of watching nothing but Woody Allen movies then try not to fall asleep and miss the last twenty minutes of the film. That said, it’s easy to get distracted.

SHADOWS AND FOG

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen

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A strange deviation and all the better for it, best watched drunk or half asleep. Seeing too many of Allen’s films together can start to feel like you’re trapped in a charity shop that only sells boxes of lame comedy and middle class nitpicking, so it’s a pleasure to see that he can succeed when trying something completely different. Drawing on classic horror, Kafka, expressionism and John Malkovich’s malleable face, Shadows and Fog creates a genuinely heavy atmosphere of dread and fear. It wraps a simple story of two people walking through an unnamed town at night avoiding a man who enjoys putting pressure on necks in a dreamlike quality that’s hard to dig out of your head. Donald Pleasence shows up to give the whole thing a campy Hammer feeling, whilst the amazing thing is how it manages to include many of Allen’s usual themes in a completely different setting: there’s debates on money and art and women, but they’re dressed up in the form of a parable, with rambling diatribes mouthed by John Cusack or Madonna accompanied by some of the finest cinematography of his career so far. It’s conclusions of illusion and fabrication tally with his usual themes of fakery and artifice in the lives of intellectuals and artists, but again, everything is simplified, less reliant on dialogue and the confines of his own surroundings than other similar pieces. It may not be a comprehensive stroll through the director’s own head, but it serves as a dutiful homage to his pet favourites and an interesting deviation in a career that frequently plays it repetitive. At this point it seems like Allen is one of the most consistent of the post-everything filmmakers; he takes and takes, his personality formed by the films of his childhood and the shots of his heroes. It’s also full of shadows and fog, so no one’s going to feel short-changed.

HUSBANDS AND WIVES

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen and Mia Farrow

Rubbish Trailer

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An honest and frequently devastating account of two marriages falling down, held up high by four great performances and a sparse, controlled script; he’s back to the funny stuff. Watching only Allen movies makes you forget how empty the rest of the film world can seem in terms of real emotion, leaving you only to compare one of his pieces with another in an endless cycle of harsh realism and wacky death-chat interludes. Stepping out of Allen’s private multiplex for just a little while reminds you how few people actually make decent films like this, films where the action comes from drunken late night visits, awkward phone calls and well-rounded characters. Allen finally accepts his strengths at realism here by framing the whole thing as a documentary, and it’s all the more traumatic for the use of straight-to-camera confessions and emotional outpourings, drawing on a life spent confessing secrets to strangers in exchange for money. All four of the main actors slap it out of the park, whilst Liam Neeson and Juliette Lewis provide a welcome breath of air away from the constant revolving misery of marriage make-ups and break downs. When he tries real emotion he can do it, he can push past the stereotypes and pretentiousness that ties a lot of his work into balls of knitted urine and create something that’s affecting and thought-provoking and relatable. And he does it here.

MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Diane Keaton

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Watching these things backwards is the right way to go, witnessing a steady climb from ass to class. However, that’s not to say there aren’t any road blocks, in this case a kooky bullet sent from the past to create an unfavourable-comparisons crisis in the early nineties. Ask anyone walking out of a Seth Rogen film what they know about Woody Allen and they’ll mention Diane Keaton and Annie Hall. Ask anyone coming out of Transformers: Dark of the Moon and they’ll claw at your hands, begging you to rip out their eyes and bury them as quickly as you can to make the pain go away. Annie’s the one, apparently. It’s the film that made the world grasp this struggling, sweating man to its collective bosom and love him, and tell him everything was all right and that he was a genius all along. Diane Keaton played a huge part in that, riffing off him and pushing him further, generally being an oddball muse with talent to burn and a face hewn out of beauty rock. She’s his walking Golden Age, his happy memories, his artistic conscience wrapped into some odd clothing choices, all of which makes Manhattan Murder Mystery a lot shit. It’s entirely Allen’s fault again; after he fucked up his relationship with Mia Farrow Keaton stepped into the role of Grandma Nancy Drew, instantly becoming the best thing in a film loaded with crap. She jumps headfirst into the babbling script and ridiculous scenarios, giving it her all and making Woody look like a nonsensical, valiumed-up moron for the duration of the run time.

Keaton’s appearance drags the film down into something more horrible than a bad movie, something that this blog can’t really comment on having not seen the partnership in its glory years yet. But even with a vague awareness of his seventies greatness you can see why Allen’s old school fans resent his recent output; because of this film, because of its dickbag characters, it’s endless ditzy bickering, it’s daring to use ‘Manhattan’ in the title. Keaton brings with her a direct reference to Allen’s glory years as a director, and having her show up in one of his lesser pieces demeans their relationship and their work together. You can never go back.

Christ, it’s meant to be a light-hearted mystery romp. Alright, the Lady From Shanghai homage drags up a smirk. But that’s it. Go home, show’s over, come back in ’77.

BULLETS OVER BROADWAY

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring John Cusack

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Wow, this one’s fun and pattern forming. A lot of Allen’s best stuff so far has come from a desire to engage with the cogs of his profession; from Vicky Christina Barcelona’s musings on the nature of art to Sweet and Lowdown’s questioning of a life spent focused on talent. Debates of art vs life tap into the very heart of Allen’s shtick, providing a truth and depth that his pork-fisted attempts at basically anything else can’t touch. Bullets Over Broadway addresses this central conceit head-on, with a neurotic playwright going toe to toe with a gifted gangster and resulting in all sorts of artistic fumbling, arguments over talent and beauty and the point of all things, as well as yet another soundtrack that overshadows the film. It also continues the latter day tradition of stuffing young actors into Allen’s own persona, with John Cusack doing a fine job as the best one yet. He’s helped by a quick pace, interesting supporting characters (Jim Broadbent as a compulsive fat-fuck, Rob Reiner as a real-life fat-fuck Marxist blowhard) and the shrill, unintelligible bird-garble of Jennifer Tilly, who makes everyone else around her look like a comedy genius. The brief scraps of the play-within-a-film are funnier than everything in Don’t Drink the Water, whilst Dianne Wiest makes a fine flight for the Allen exit playing a demented Gloria Swanson wax-work with a penchant for long walks in New York Parks. She’s a great actress, even with her odd puckered up face, and the fact that she hasn’t worked with Allen again since is another black mark in his career book. Maybe all his best films have to shove in someone called Diane…

DON'T DRINK THE WATER

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen

Adorable Alternative Version

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An incredible bucket of crap. Let’s look at how many Sopranos actors have appeared in Allen films:

Edie Falco (Carmela)

– Bullets Over Broadway

The boss’ put upon wife gets an even shorter stick by being deprived of any lines. Shut up, possible greatest actress of her generation!

Tony Sirico (Paulie)

– Celebrity, Deconstructing Harry, Everyone Says I LoveYou, Mighty Aphrodite, Bullets Over Broadway

Psycho for hire plays a load of hoods, world keeps turning.

Aida Turturo (Janice)

– Celebrity, Manhattan Murder Mystery

In Celebrity she’s a fortune teller!

John Ventimiglia (Artie Bucco)

– Bullets Over Broadway

Seeing the mild-mannered chef play a mobster is liable to make your head pop open and spurt your brains all over the screen. It’s not supposed to be this way!

Arthur J. Nascarella (Some Guy)

– The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

Who?

Matt Servitto (Agent Harris)

– Melinda and Melinda

Perhaps he should launch an investigation into how the movie ended up so bad. Because he played an FBI agent.

Jerry Adler (Hesh)

– Manhattan Murder Mystery

Murderer! You got away with murder you murdering murderer!

Tony Darrow (Larry Boy Barese)

– Small Time Crooks, Sweet and Lowdown, Celebrity, Deconstructing Harry, Mighty Aphrodite, Bullets Over Broadway,

Nope.

Paul Herman (Beansie)

– Mighty Aphrodite, Bullets Over Broadway, Radio Days, The Purple Rose of Cairo,

Had his legs broken by a psychopath, deserved it for starring in Mighty Aphrodite.

David Margulies (Tony’s Attorney)

– Celebrity

Innocent bystander to the greatest putdown of the 1980s:

Yes, it’s true. This man has no dick.

There's probably more. But Whaddya Gonna Do?

MIGHTY APHRODITE

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Mira Sorvino

Time Saver

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So it’s all Melinda and Melinda again, where a talented actress acts her career off in order to make something beautiful from a boring script. Miro Sorvino punches out of a convoluted plot and distracting Greek-chorus distractions to produce an effective portrayal of a likeable character who rips the film from Allen’s clutches; until her arrival the piece meanders along as another unbelievable list of whinging, dug-up quips and improbable marriages to beautiful women, Allen himself showcasing a slightly creepier variation of his usual amiably confused character. He shuts up when Sorvino arrives. At many points in their exchanges you can actually see him tighten, stopping and listening to what the woman’s making out of his lame lines and looking on in wonder as she claims an Oscar using one of his poorer stories. The plot’s a mess that doesn’t know what it’s trying to say, Helena Bonham Carter’s out of time and space as yet another of Allen’s creepily misogynistic women who don’t know what’s good for them, and it’s got Peter Weller in it. Peter Weller was Robocop, and has an evil face. He looks like he’s about to bury everyone involved in a landfill, then poke the dirt slowly with his evil penis. It’s distracting, but probably for the best. Edit out everything but Sorvino’s scenes and you’ll have a great performance that makes no sense, but then neither does most of Allen’s other output from the decade of Bill and Ted.