Isn’t it an ethical violation for you to be sharing this information with us? I mean, you are Ms. Previn’s psychiatrist, right? You’d have to be, to speak about her motivations with such authority. I mean, if you weren’t her psychiatrist, you’d just be talking out of your ass and that’s plain silly.
I very much liked Love and Death, but I find Annie Hall actively irritating and have never been able to get through it all in one sitting.
The criticism Woody Allen made of Mia Farrow’s family is unforgivable. He described her house as more of a foundling home, and claimed she was a bad mother. None of these things held up in court.
He did not know the first things about his adopted son Moses, and when the judge said he would allow Allen visitation with his biological son Satchell, he refused, stating “I’ll accept visitation with all three of the children or none of them.”
In the end, he got nothing. No custody, no visitation. The judge ruled him an indifferent, absent father to his two sons, and stated his relationship with adopted daughter Dylan with inappropriate, and bordered on sexual.
No, those last two were pretty good. (Liked the first one too.)
Pretty good by Woody Allen standards?
How do you think Cassandra’s Dream compares with Crimes and Misdemeanors or Match Point?
How do you think Whatever Works compares with Deconstructing Harry or Manhattan Murder Mystery?
(These questions are not me trying to point out that you are “wrong”, I’m genuinely interested since you seem to see something in those two movies that I don’t see/)
All great movies have been made by monsters. Would it even occur to you to see a bad movie just because you knew the director was a stand-up guy and decent family man? You have to separate the concerns. Allen is, on his best projects, a first-rate filmmaker. And he’s an evil, twisted gnome. There really is no contradiction.
Why is there a question mark in the title?
Yes, Woody Allen is a scumbag in at least some aspects of his personal life. Like a lot of other people, it’s just that those other people are famous directors/actors/whatevers. Scumbags still need to make a living and a lot of people who make stuff people like happen to be scumbags in their personal lives.
Basically, I’ve learned to separate the artist from the art. It would have to be something extraordinarily creepy/criminal/sick/evil for me to refuse a work based on the personal traits of the artist.
It’s very hard to equal a Crimes and Misdemeanors, but that did not diminish my enjoyment of the very good Cassandra’s Dream. And if not every film can be an Annie Hall, that does not make the other films bad. I cannot think of a single “bad” movie of his, although I like some better than others.
For your third paragraph, I actually liked Whatever Works better than the other two you mentioned. Why? I’m not sure. I liked the other two too, but Whatever Works simply worked for me.
I’m curious: how does one indicate air quotes in print?
I’m a huge fan of Woody Allen and I agree that some of his best films are among the best movies made by any director. I’ll quibble only with these, because they are well within my recent memory.
These films are such horrible dreck that they made me angry as I watched them in the theater, and I groaned audibly multiple times. I felt embarrassed for the actors.
Ha! Well, I gave my opinion (which was faint praise at best). Now I wanna hear what Siam Sam thinks!
Well, I don’t know what there is to say. I liked those movies even if they aren’t among his best. To call them “dreck” is simply absurd.
The opening of any Woody Allen movie is a real event for both me and the wife. We love all the little touches, right down to the same font in the credits that he’s used consistently for so many years. The song selections. Jesus H. Christ, the man has put out a movie a year for more than 40 years, and I’ve not seen a loser among them. He simply has no equal.