I'm currently having a pretty fantastic time binging through Woody Allen's filmography with my girlfriend, and it's just so fun to go through a filmography of 40-50 films where it seems so many of them are, at the very least, quite good. I've "only" seen 15 Allen films at the moment, with
The Purple Rose of Cairo being my definite favorite -- an utterly delightful film that's both, for me, actually Allen's best comedy in terms of the sheer amount of laughs,
and his most emotionally resonant and intelligently structured work. That ending just knocks me out every time; Farrow is so pitch-perfect that, between this and her other best performance in
Rosemary's Baby, I have to wonder if she was just born to play a kind of lovably mousy but tragic victim with an adorable little girl's voice and general temperament. And those scenes from the film-within are so dead-on to so many films of that time, right down to the sassy black maid fluffing the pillows -- dead-on, hilarious stuff.
Also in the "masterpiece" category is
Crimes and Misdemeanors, which I feel has a power and gravitas only hinted at in slightly overvalued works like
Hannah and Her Sisters (which has a similarly tragicomic Woody B-story that's more obviously "tragic" yet miles less affecting, interesting and funny than Allen's failure with Farrow and lampooning of Alda in
Crimes) and the slick, tightly crafted but somewhat overwrought semi-remake of
Match Point. Along with the above two, the bracingly intense
Husbands and Wives, the (intentionally) paradoxically hollow-yet-lush
Manhattan, and the hilarious and insightful
Zelig form the rest of my top favorites at this point. Also very, very good are
Radio Days (the great Di Palma, along with the production design, really went all out on this one; every frame exudes a warm and seductive nostalgia),
Manhattan Murder Mystery (which may go even higher on a re-watch; it's a hell of a lot of fun), and (to a slightly lesser extent)
Hannah and Her Sisters, which I have conflicting feelings about -- the "happy ending" is well-done unto itself, but when attached to what came before, it seems a bit absurd. I really liked
Broadway Danny Rose on first viewing, but this second time it somehow seemed so... slight. It's still one of his better works, with typically great work from Gordon Willis (did he ever shoot a film that
didn't look wonderful?) and one of Woody's best performances, but it just amounts to so little in the end -- none of its tonally disparate parts cohere enough to imbue the rather schmaltzy final scene between Allen and Farrow with the pathos it's straining to reach. It's a really very "nice little film," that's the perfect backhanded compliment/term for it, but I can't understand its more recent increasing canonization as one of Allen's masterpieces.
Of course Allen hammers home the dour "universe is a big dice game and morality is meaningless in the face of pure luck" schtick in
Match Point, a movie which utterly knocked me out upon first release in the cinema, the impressionable high-schooler that I was, but which now seems little more than a solid, elegant little crime-thriller with existential trimmings -- an appetizer to the full-course meal of
Crimes and Misdemeanors. The murder scenes still pack a punch, to be sure, and I love the use of opera throughout and the general stylistic confidence of the thing, but it somehow feels curiously hollow and passionless all the same. That said, I'm sure it's gotta be Allen's "sexiest" film, which is not saying much.
Now for the controversial part... Somehow,
Annie Hall's greatness still eludes me. It's fine, it's quite good really. It's one of those rare films where you can palpably sense its massive eventual influence on other movies as it unfolds; but I don't find it nearly as funny as most of the aforementioned films, and certainly not as poignant. All it has on the latter front is a kind of slight sigh, a bittersweet "oh well" as two people cross paths and walk in the other direction perhaps permanently, but the problem is I've never felt that the relationship between Allen and Keaton was all that profound or deep or worthwhile in the first place so, as in
Broadway Danny Rose, the closing pathos-reach of AH ends up coming up rather short. Much worse, the humor in the film strikes me as Allen indulging some of his worst tendencies; it's permeated by a kind of self-satisfied knocking-down of cheap pseudo-"intellectual" strawmen, as well as those dumb whitebread schmucks in flyover country, resulting in a kind of middlebrow, quasi-populist type of humor I find ugly, irritating and mean-spirited in all the wrong ways -- not to mention pandering to some pretty regressive impulses. In the film Allen seems to thumb his nose at not just the cheap-shot caricatures of "intellectual" types but the entire idea of aspiring to think deeply or write deeply at all in the first place. (Just what is so wrong or hilariously pompous about the movie-line guy's diatribe about Bergman's film, anyway? Besides the "I'm an insufferable asshole" manner in which the actor delivers it, I don't see how it's any more objectionable than what Alvy or Allen himself would say about some other movie
he dislikes, or Bob Dylan or whatever. Yet somehow the scene is held up in pop culture as the ultimate "a-ha, take that you pretentious pseud!" diss-joke, as if marshaling in McLuhan for a sentence imbues the knowing, hip Alvy/Allen-receptive audience with an aura of merit and coolness just for recognizing such "wrongness.") I don't suppose anyone here agrees with me, and I'm probably not making my case very well, but AH is no more than merely a good film for me, for these reasons and others, e.g. the broad obviousness of much of its humor compared to the more subtle comedy in his 80s pictures. And I never found Annie Hall herself, though Keaton is very good, to be
that fascinating or unique of a character, to be this kind of weird yet mysteriously attractive, difficult but quirky woman who ya just gotta love for all her little quirks, that the film tries to paint her as (the first Manic Pixie Dream Girl? Some have suggested, though I dunno). It all just doesn't ring true or very deep for me. I think Farrow in the 80s was a better "muse" for Allen.
As far as the real bottom of the barrel, though, at least at this point,
Alice and especially
Scoop take the cake. The former is just such a lifeless mishmash of various tonal/genre ingredients from other films and artworks which
should be utterly fascinating but just ends up feeling awfully slight, and awfully short-changed by that ultra-rushed "oh, and then these monumental things also happened by the way, but I gotta go, see ya" of an ending (plus, it utterly wastes Joe Mantegna in a dishwater-dull role, which should be a cardinal sin; but he was so outstanding in Mamet's
Homicide the following year that I guess it cancels out). The latter is just fluff, and actually not that bad fluff -- pure Sunday afternoon fare that leaves the mind as soon as it's digested -- which I guess says something about Allen's talents (though, again, I'm only approx 1/4th through his filmography, and not looking forward to
Curse of the Jade Scorpion,
Small Time Crooks,
Shadows and Fog,
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy,
Melinda and Melinda, etc).
Anyway, right now I'm very interested in seeing
Bullets Over Broadway,
Another Woman***,
Interiors,
Vicky Cristina Barcelona,
Anything Else,
Sweet and Lowdown and
Cassandra's Dream, to name a few.
***That Dan Schneider imbecile (who is given to stuff like declaring himself a better critic than Rivette, or his wife a better poet than Dylan Thomas; look
here for more) is probably the worst film critic I've had the displeasure of reading, though to call him an actual film critic is to grant him the morsel of legitimacy that he so desperately seeks (it's quite sad, really). Anyway, he and his e-cronies apparently call
Another Woman one of WA's very best, with one of these cronies even recently publishing a lengthy e-book covering all of Allen's films and basically regarding all of them as good or great, and of course challenging every other critic who differs with them on even the slightest detail of interpretation, causing said other critic to be a complete useless idiot as a result. The amount of pompousness on this joke of a critic and his copycats is astounding. I've read many portions of the book, and it's about 98% intolerable, and pretty sad how this guy slavishly adheres to an already awful, rigid and proudly emotionless and prosaic critical language and method of evaluating art. I don't understand
how this hack could have seemingly so many followers, but I suspect many are just sock-puppets of the man himself. I mean... one Ebert blog from 2009 that happened to compliment Schneider in passing (despite containing a bunch of noxious Schneider excerpts that bashed Ebert just for slightly differing with some interpretation) is, I kid you not,
still drawing new comments about every week from either DS himself or his league of die-hard supporters who angrily insult anyone, from 2009 to 2014, who dared to say anything at all negative about the man; it's pathetic, to say the very least.
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