Word: allen
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...window. He testily parsed fine distinctions (Microsoft's "deal" with Apple vs. their "relationship") and professed to be nonplussed by common Anglo-Saxon words ("I have no idea what you're talking about when you say 'ask.'"). At times the wiry, high-pitched, tousled-haired billionaire morphed into Woody Allen riffing on Bill Clinton's deposition in the Ken Starr inquiry...
...Woody Allen's Celebrity tracks the former's possibly predictable fall and the latter's entirely unexpected rise within the tensely striving world of Manhattan's media and cultural demimonde. Since Branagh's performance (rather daringly) imitates Allen's anxiously stammering screen persona, and Davis is doing something she has done--expertly--for the writer-director before, playing a jilted, tilted woman, it may sound as if this is yet another of Allen's comically discordant chamber pieces about the impossibility of permanent connection between postmodern urbanites who think too much about themselves and feel too little for each other...
...Allen traces Lee's and Robin's parallel courses toward opposite fates, Celebrity, even though it is shot in austere black and white on palpably real locations, turns into something new for him: an epic. It contains 242 speaking parts and 5,128 extras--forces sufficient, if deployed in a different context, to make a biblical spectacle. Or--better comparison--a screen version of Thackeray's Vanity Fair or some other satirical, multilayered saga of halfway decent, halfway desperate people trying to make their way in a corrupt society...
...pilgrim's path is made easier, Allen says, if he or she is armored by innocence rather than made vulnerable by naked need. It also helps if there is someone utterly indifferent to fame who can lend a guiding hand. It's Robin's good luck that such a figure interrupts her consultation with the cosmetic surgeon. He's a television producer named Tony Gardella (Joe Mantegna) doing a story on the currently hot doctor, and he thinks Robin looks fine just the way she is. And he thinks she might shake her funk if she comes to work...
Good idea. Like Allen himself, Tony brings clear vision but no reformist zeal to the business of chronicling celebrity life. It's just something he, like a dwindling few of his fellow citizens, is trying to live with (and in his case, make a living from) as rationally as possible. He guesses that Robin's self-consciousness, her sense that she doesn't belong in the same room with the rich and famous, will play well on TV. She's as addled as anyone in her audience would be in fast company, so of course viewers identify with...