Word: allen
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featuring Woody Allen, Soon-Yi Previn...
...Woody Allen is not someone generally considered predictable, but this scene in Barbara Kopple's rollicking documentary Wild Man Blues reveals a supreme irony. While missing the Academy Awards to go woodwind-shopping might seem eccentric to us, that decision seems supremely predictable to Allen himself. He'll always pick his music over his stardom--it's just that no one in America cares (or even knows) that he plays...
Wild Man Blues follows Woody Allen and his seven-member jazz band along their 1996 springtime tour of Europe. If that synopsis sounds like material for a three-minute "Entertainment Tonight" profile, then kudos go out immediately to Kopple, who knows that Allen's career as a jazzman is not a fluff-level footnote to his more obvious engagement in the cinema. Her feature-length documentary has already been faulted by some viewers at Sundance for downplaying Woody-as-Filmmaker, a criticism that misses Wild Man Blues's whole point: Woody Allen considers himself a developing musician who's lucky...
...think it's seen just as a hobby of mine," Allen tells his sister Letty early in the movie, when the band and entourage are flying across the Atlantic to begin the tour. Any nervousness about the presence of Kopple's camera is small potatoes next to his genuine stagefright at the prospect in front of him: weeks of one-night-only stops in Paris, Madrid, Turin, and other Old World cities, playing to audiences who know little about primitivist New Orleans jazz (which the band renders with real zest) but who know a great deal about...
Unfortunately, that might be the wrong reason to attend. "I'm not a sufficient enough musician to hold their attention," Allen frets, but his travelling companions, apparently used to his anxieties, gently console him. These initial scenes of conversation not only introduce us to the various members of the caravan, including then-fiancee Soon-Yi Previn, they also establish the level of access we get to Woody throughout Wild Man Blues.He talks comfortably, even conversationally before the camera, and he is as happy to discuss perceptions of him as he is presenting his own thoughts...