I’ve never been a fan of
Woody Allen’s movies. They are prissy elitist
crap with forced, pretentious dialogue, unlikeable self-centred characters, and
a pronounced New York snobbery. I don’t
find them particularly intellectual unless the audience itself has never read
any great books or seen any European films.
It’s intellectualism for dummies.
His early films, pre- Annie
Hall, are mildly funny. The framing
device is okay in SLEEPER and BANANAS and TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN but the jokes
are strictly on the level of Catskills Borsht Belt humor – Allen’s nebbish
character wears thin quickly. His later
films, post-Annie Hall, are what are really awful and what I described above.
It is absolutely painful to
have to listen to his shallow Bergman fan creatures deliver their
self-conscious, rudimentary pronouncements on life. These are the type of people who carry around
great works of literature so they can be viewed by others doing this.
ANNIE HALL is the start
. It is ground zero for the excruciatingly
precocious world of the modern self-absorbed intellectual who has neither depth
of thought nor range of feeling to justify his preciousness. Diane Keaton, a good actress whose greatest
role was in LOOKING FOR MR GOODBAR, is genuinely annoying as she is in all of
Allen’s films.
MANHATTAN, the follow-up to
ANNIE HALL, is full of the usual cheerful immorality as the norm for all its
characters. Infidelity galore and Allen
has a relationship with a 17 year old girl supposedly based on his own
relationship with actress Stacey Nelkin around the same time. I believe Ronan’s Farrow’s accusations for
several reasons and Allen’s views on underage sexual matters as shown in MANHATTAN
are one reason why. Hollywood in the
70’s was an evil place (it’s still an evil place) where pederasty was the
pastime for such criminal deviants as Allen, Roman Polanski etc.
Since then, he has fallen
into a formula – the same old tired tropes with occasional changes in setting
and time of the action.
Allen’s films for me represent
the overreliance by many creative people on therapy and seeing a psychiatrist
or therapist. This inward looking focus
creates a world that when rendered on film or TV or in a book is far too insular
too engage the living, those who don’t have time to dwell on oversensitivity,
those who actually live their lives.
And that’s what the big problem
with Woody Allen is for me. Not every
film has to feel like real life. One can
go to outer space. One can fight
monsters. But when they come back to
Earth, I want to see that they know life not a musty collection of stale,
canned substitute for witty. I don’t
want the world of the shallow pseudo intellectual with mundane dialogue and
practiced amorality, I don’t want to see the world of the obvious and dull filmmaker,
the world of Woody Allen.
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