Word: allen
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...flailing, ten-minute performance when his lips have failed and his clarinet reed won't vibrate properly. Though the same scene played just as gruelingly and effectively in 1995's dramatic film Georgia, the sequence brilliantly captures the audience's experience of watching a doomed performance, as well as Allen's own furious determination to literally breathe the life back into his music...
...strictly honest Allen is in presenting himself, or to what degree he is "performing," is a question the film simultaneously raises and dismisses. On the hand, his barbed humor--which the movie captures more ecstatically than any of Allen's own recent work--can easily be read as deflective, resistant to any penetrating insight into how he really operates, what he really thinks...
...same time, might Allen's "honest self" actually exist in the permanence with which he "performs"? A man who tours Europe in a band, who has made one movie a year for two decades, and whose most private relationships are themselves so inherently sensational is hardly giving a false image of himself by putting on a show. The Woody Allen of Wild Man Blues may or not be "the real Woody Allen," whatever that means, but his jokes, confessions, and worries all ring true when held against one another...
Further evidence of Kopple's sagacity appears in the dialogues she has chosen to include in her film. Any movie ultimately rides on what is or is not cut, and Kopple and editor Lawrence Silk have chosen impressively candid, crystalline moments through which Allen and his companions represent themselves. His assertion that "I just don't want to be where I am at any given moment" speaks as informatively about his personal-life problems as it does about his approach to touring...
Have I mentioned, though, how uproarious thiswhole thing is? Allen arrives in London, theband's final stop, with the prediction that thistime "they'll hate me in my own language." Betweenconcerts, as American tourists in ritzy localesflash his photo with starstruck squeals, hewonders why people who will fly overseas to takehis picture "won't pay ten cents to see one of mymovies...