Scoop (Woody Allen, 2006)

[Noir of the Night]

Trailer:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movies/feature/scoop.html

It looks to me like this film will have the energy that was missing from the Curse of the Jade Scorpion-Anything Else era (although I did enjoy those films).

[Dylan]

This looks like so much fun! I can't wait.

[jorencain]

"The man is a liar and a murderer, and I say that with all due respect." He's stealing from himself, of course, but that line will always make me laugh. I can't wait either.

[Dylan]

We have to wait and see what context he uses it in here, but ending a firm jab with (the brilliant) "with all due respect" was originally in one of his comedy routines, so it dates pretty far back. I too was happy to hear it again here (this time, of course, with 'liar and murderer' in front of it).

And yeah, I have a feeling that this will definitely be the most genuinely fun film of 2006, and it's just roughly two months away.

[Antoine Doinel]

http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/scoop/

I'm cautiously optimistic on this one. On the plus side, Scarlet Johannsen looks really comfortable in an Allen comedic role and seems to be hitting all the right notes. The one-liners in the trailer are also really quite funny. On the minus side, I think the Ian McShane "ghost" character is a little ridiculous and the trailer seems curiously absent of Hugh Jackman. I wonder how well he was able to adjust to Allen's world.....

[montgomery]

I don't know--seems like expectations of Allen have dropped a lot in the last 10 years. Of course, how could they not, but now people seem to be content with anything.
Not only is he being praised for stealing from himself, but the particular joke that he's re-using is the last line in the trailer, as if it's the funniest bit in the movie.
Not to mention that I seem to recognize every scene from Oedipus Wrecks, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Small Time Crooks, Jade Scorpion....in other words, from his lightest, and in the latter 2 examples, worst films. I hoped Allen was going to get over his fluff comedy stage after the deal with Dreamworks--I would have sworn he made those films with a gun to his head.
Please--just give us something within the same range as Stardust Memories, Another Woman, Husbands and Wives, even Shadows and Fog or Sleeper. I'll even take Celebrity or Sweet and Lowdown at this point! Doesn't anyone remember that this was the greatest master of American films in at least the last 30 years? Maybe that's up for debate, but he's totally out of the running with everything he's made in the last 10 years. Not only is he making insignficant films, but he's making them poorly.

That said, I never trust trailers, especially for Woody Allen films. I think after I heard EMF's "Unbelievable" in the Celebrity trailer, I knew all Woody Allen trailers were designed to hide the fact that Allen had anything to do with the film being advertised.

[jorencain]

Please--just give us something within the same range as Stardust Memories, Another Woman, Husbands and Wives, even Shadows and Fog or Sleeper. I'll even take Celebrity or Sweet and Lowdown at this point!

Does "Match Point" not qualify? Yes, this one does look fluff, for better or worse, but things have certainly been on the upswing in recent years (for me, at least). I'm sure I read somewhere (on this forum, most likely) that he's planning for this to be his last comedy, and he's going to stop casting himself. I don't think I imagined that, but I apologize if I did. I personally think that's a good move on his part, as I've always preferred his more serious work. Point being, even if this film is crap (which I can't imagine it is), I still believe he's on his way back up.

And I completely agree that Woody Allen trailers are quite misleading, and cannot be trusted in the least.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

I'm sure I read somewhere (on this forum, most likely) that he's planning for this to be his last comedy, and he's going to stop casting himself. I don't think I imagined that, but I apologize if I did.

No, you're right. He has said that. I don't recall the source either but I do remember reading it. I think that is a smart move on his part. He's done enough light-weight comedies and Match Point showed that he is capable of doing the serious stuff and doing it well.

And I completely agree that Woody Allen trailers are quite misleading, and cannot be trusted in the least.

Exactly. I think that's true of a lot of trailers... esp. for movies that have a lot more going on. I always remember when Casino came out how some of the trailers advertised the film as a love story between De Niro and Stone's character and people went to see it expecting that and were completely put off by the violence!

Of course, when you see a trailer for an Adam Sandler film (unless it's Punch-Drunk Love or Spanglish) you know exactly what you're getting.

[Zumpano]

Doesn't this trailer even say: "From The Director of Match Point", instead of: "From Director Woody Allen"? I find that a tad bit strange.

[Dylan]

Doesn't this trailer even say: "From The Director of Match Point", instead of: "From Director Woody Allen"? I find that a tad bit strange.

"Match Point" is his most popular, acclaimed, and financially successful film in nearly twenty years, and the only film of his that a good amount of modern filmgoers have seen, and it has Johannsen. It makes perfect sense that they'd take advantage of all of that for "Scoop's" marketing.

[Dylan]

New York Magazine article:



[quote]

AND GOD CREATED SCARLETT

It's a classic summer dilemma: Nebbish guy meets beautiful girl—say, on a beach—and struggles to find some way, any way, to impress her. Not having washboard abs or bulging pecs or nonprescription sunglasses, he relies on what he does possess—smarts. Normally this story does not end well. But every once in a while (or so nebbish mythology tells us), the guy strives and strains to impress the girl and she, in turn, inspires him to come up with something extraordinary: a witty joke. Then the woman laughs, the two click, and something quite wonderful starts up between them.

Now, Woody Allen doesn't seem like he spends much time surfside. And Scarlett Johansson's idea of summer in the city is “to get inside as soon as possible,â€

[Antoine Doinel]

Is there any reason that the studios keep dumping Allen's comedies in the latter part of the summer? Melinda And Melinda had the same release date and if I recall, dismal BO returns. This seems more suited for an early fall release.

[justeleblanc]

Is there any reason that the studios keep dumping Allen's comedies in the latter part of the summer? Melinda And Melinda had the same release date and if I recall, dismal BO returns. This seems more suited for an early fall release.

melinda was an april release.

[yoshimori]

Not great, but...

After its first ten minutes or so, the movie elicited more laughs from me than any Woody Allen movie of the past ten years [which, I know, I know, isn't saying anything]. Allen himself is the source of the laughs. He plays a lame American magician pretending to be an oil magnate in the midst of high British society.

Johansson is for the most part passable. The new DP, Remi Adefarasin, is weak. But the music, by this Tschaikowsky guy, is lots of fun.

[Christian]

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0630,g ... 63,20.html

London Fog
Woody Allen's second straight English excursion is a failed return to comedy
by Bill Gallo
July 25th, 2006 2:26 PM

For 35 years, Woody Allen was a long shot to stray into the Bronx or Staten Island—much less the alien reaches of London, England. The creator of Manhattan has always been joined to his chosen borough like pastrami on rye—so when he ventured abroad last year to direct the intriguing morality tale Match Point, moviegoers were taken aback. George Bush doesn't join the Taliban; Woody Allen doesn't cross the East River.

Allen should have concluded his expatriate foray with Match Point. The second straight film he's made in London—an alleged return to comedy called Scoop—is so flat, dull, and off form that it seems to have been conceived in a fog. It not only lacks the verve and energy of Allen's best New York–based work, it feels culturally adrift, like some bewildered tourist trying to read a city map held upside down. For years, even some of the staunchest Allen fans have suspected that his best days are behind him. But when his famously neurotic one-liners start to bomb, there's real trouble. At the very least, the filmmaker might have borrowed some of the brilliant mischief of this movie's vastly superior namesake, written by the great British satirist Evelyn Waugh. Alas, he doesn't.

The latest object of Allen's affections— at least in the dramatic realm—is the nubile Scarlett Johansson, who portrayed a demanding, self-absorbed actress in Match Point and returns here as Sondra Pransky, a naive American journalism student who's visiting a friend in London when she inadvertently stumbles onto what may turn out to be the murder scandal of the decade. The bespectacled Sondra's reportorial skills are limited, to say the least, but she's not above a bit of feminine wile. Make what you will of Scoop's first scene: The heroine pursues into a London hotel lobby a horny movie director who's about three times her age and, instead of getting an interview, lands in his bed. If, in Allen's scheme of things, wishful thinking merges with autobiography, so be it. It's a bit tougher to accept the filmmaker's appearance in Scoop as a professional magician named Splendini, who specializes in "dematerializing" women by means of a double-paneled box. Here is Allen as stammering self-parody; a pent-up bundle of tics and quirks so irritating that, halfway through, you may feel like ending the misery (his and yours) by clamping an ether-soaked rag over that long-beloved old face.

As it is, Splendini—a/k/a Sidney Waterman, an old-fashioned vaudevillian to the bone—becomes the unwitting agent of Sondra Pransky's investigative and romantic adventures. Plucked from the audience and secreted away in his magic box, the young woman is unexpectedly accosted there by a renowned (albeit recently deceased) London newspaperman named Joe Strombel (Deadwood's foulmouthed Ian McShane). Frustrated that he can no longer get the story himself, the avuncular Joe puts Sondra on the trail of a suave nobleman named Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), who the dead reporter insists is London's new version of Jack the Ripper, an elusive monster known to the Fleet Street tabloids as the "Tarot Card Killer." Like Humphrey Bogart in Play It Again, Sam, canny Joe becomes the protagonist's guide and mentor from beyond the grave.

As if this supernatural turn of plot were not familiar enough, Allen also insists on having Sondra—posing now as "Jade Spence"—fall in love with the dashing and possibly dangerous Peter even as she snoops into his secrets. In a goofier development, she also recruits the reluctant Sidney to play the part of her father, "Mr. Spence," who's quickly drawn into the chase. The notion of a phobia-rattled Jew from New York dropped into the staid Protestant garden parties of upper-crust London could have provided Allen with one of his richest comic spectacles. But he doesn't make much of it beyond attacking the buffet table and startling the guests with a couple of ancient card tricks. "I was of the Hebrew persuasion," Sidney says of his origins, "but I converted to narcissism." That's about the pinnacle in the wisecrack department, and as far as pursuing the suspected killer goes, the director did that in much funnier fashion back on home turf in Manhattan Murder Mystery.

In the end, the semi-dimwitted Sondra gets her man, and Sidney Waterman winds up, like Joe Strombel, in limbo—here portrayed as a tramp steamer adrift on a fog-shrouded sea—standing among a group of baffled "passengers" who are wondering where they're headed and why. Given the inertia of Scoop and the uncertain course of Allen's career as it enters twilight, it's an appropriate final image.

The fact that I'm not the least bit suprised does not make it less painful.

[Antoine Doinel]

Woody Allen: Making Movies Ain't That Big a Deal

Woody Allen has downplayed his Hollywood auteur status, insisting that he has "no commitment to my work" in the sense of spending long, arduous weeks and months developing and producing it. "Look, it takes a couple of months to write a script. This isn't Finnegan's Wake," he told today's (Wednesday) Washington Post during an interview to promote his latest film, Scoop. (James Joyce said that it took him seven years to write Finnegan's Wake and that it should take readers that long to read it.) "I pull it out of the typewriter, bring it in, three days later I have a budget. Then we do pre-production, which is about 10 weeks. I mean, I'm not doing a $100 million budget. I'm working with $15 million or so. I shoot for about 10 weeks maximum."

[rs98762001]

Woody Allen: Making Movies Ain't That Big a Deal

Woody Allen has downplayed his Hollywood auteur status, insisting that he has "no commitment to my work" in the sense of spending long, arduous weeks and months developing and producing it. "Look, it takes a couple of months to write a script. This isn't Finnegan's Wake," he told today's (Wednesday) Washington Post during an interview to promote his latest film, Scoop. (James Joyce said that it took him seven years to write Finnegan's Wake and that it should take readers that long to read it.) "I pull it out of the typewriter, bring it in, three days later I have a budget. Then we do pre-production, which is about 10 weeks. I mean, I'm not doing a $100 million budget. I'm working with $15 million or so. I shoot for about 10 weeks maximum."

Which is as good an explanation I've heard for the way in which genius usually turns slowly and inexorably into laziness.

[jorencain]

Woody Allen: Making Movies Ain't That Big a Deal

Woody Allen has downplayed his Hollywood auteur status, insisting that he has "no commitment to my work" in the sense of spending long, arduous weeks and months developing and producing it. "Look, it takes a couple of months to write a script. This isn't Finnegan's Wake," he told today's (Wednesday) Washington Post during an interview to promote his latest film, Scoop. (James Joyce said that it took him seven years to write Finnegan's Wake and that it should take readers that long to read it.) "I pull it out of the typewriter, bring it in, three days later I have a budget. Then we do pre-production, which is about 10 weeks. I mean, I'm not doing a $100 million budget. I'm working with $15 million or so. I shoot for about 10 weeks maximum."

Which is as good an explanation I've heard for the way in which genius usually turns slowly and inexorably into laziness.

As much as I love Woody Allen, I have to agree with this. In a way, I like that he's nonchalant about his work, and downplays it. At the same time though, I really wish he was a little more full of himself, and believed in what he is doing. I was (and still am) hoping that the trend has turned around, and that his work is on an unpward turn, but I don't think that attitude really helps his creative output. Bummer.

[bunuelian]

What's wrong with doing things efficiently? A good number of great directors have worked that way. It's how he's been so prolific. That his films haven't been consistently good in the last decade isn't necessarily because he doesn't want to make sweeping epics about ancient Greece or the antiquity of New York gang violence.

[Dylan]

Guys, this is nothing new. Woody's been like this toward his work since "Take the Money and Run." He's likely the most humble filmmaker I know of.

Being one of the resident Allen nuts on the forum (and the member who has actually been quoted elsewhere here as the guy who thinks Allen has never made a bad movie), I'll be seeing "Scoop" opening day, first showing, and I'll post my thoughts here afterwards. I expect at the very least a charming and entertaining film.

[denti alligator]

My guess is Woody Allen would know how to spell Finnegans Wake, and that the reporter is just an idiot. But who knows. (Sorry, a pet pieve of mine. C'mon! One of the most important works of fiction of the 20th century and it's consistently misspelled.)

[jorencain]

I'll be there opening day as well - I hope I love the film. And I realize that he's humble and efficient, but it's also sounding more and more that he doesn't really care about what he's turning out. I don't think he needs to make sweeping epics either, but I do think that he (or any artist) should have large aspirations for even the tiniest project. Again, I love Woody Allen, and I can only think of 2 or 3 of his films that I don't like; I just agree that the attitude he conveys can be taken as a sign of some amount of laziness. I may be misreading it though, who knows.

[Antoine Doinel]

Which is as good an explanation I've heard for the way in which genius usually turns slowly and inexorably into laziness.

As much as I love Woody Allen, I have to agree with this. In a way, I like that he's nonchalant about his work, and downplays it. At the same time though, I really wish he was a little more full of himself, and believed in what he is doing.

If Allen was full of himself, the tone of this thread would be "with all the sub-par work Allen has done lately, I can't believe he's still so full of himself."

I think it's safe to say Allen's comments were flippant. As someone else pointed out he's always been humble about his work. I recall reading somewhere that he said he considers himself a Grade B filmmaker at best.

You have to remember that very few filmmakers are blessed with the situation the Allen has. Since his early days, he can get any cast he wants to work on spec. His budgets are famously low, which means financing is never a problem. It's virtually impossible for his films not to make money, especially with the advent of DVD. Essentially, any script he writes, he can film. Unlike other filmmakers working with larger budgets and scripts that may involve exotic location shooting or special effects, Allen has never been in a position where he has had to fight for a script to be made or an actor to get cast or a special effects shot to be produced. I think maybe even he forgets he's possibly the only A-list director who has it this easy.

Finally, something like Match Point doesn't happen by someone who is lazy or doesn't care about their work.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

I think that it will be interesting to see how these current films age in 10 or 20 years time when we can look at his body of work as a whole. I know in the case of some of his '90s output, I've mellowed towards some of them that I wasn't too crazy about initially. For example, I thought that Celebrity was "okay," but over the years I've enjoyed it more and more.

[scalesojustice]

based on Match Point, latest allen film i've seen, i can't imagine even remembering that in 10 to 20 years. i have a feeling that if you look at his body of work, you could probably pick one or two he has made in the past 10 years and get the gist of it.

but, i will be seeing Scoop this weekend as i'm awfully sick of flashy summer movies, i hope this is a change of pace.