Word: allen
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...born into Hollywood royalty, the third of seven children of actress Maureen O'Sullivan (who played an unflattering version of herself in Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters) and director John Farrow (whose films include Sorority House, Full Confession, Married and in Love and Easy Come, Easy Go). As a child Mia had do-gooder dreams of becoming a Schweitzer-like doctor in the tropics; each Christmas she staged a pageant and sent the proceeds to the March of Dimes. The actress scored hits as a moody teen on TV's Peyton Place and a wife giving birth...
...Allen's argument goes like this: Once upon a time, he and Mia were together, adopted kids, had one. When they stopped having sex, it was as if they were divorced but retained joint custody of the children. He was surely divorced emotionally; he could see no betrayal of Mia by turning to Soon-Yi. Perhaps Mia was still in love with him, assuming she had any love left over. But if Farrow's love turned to total obsession -- the woman-scorned syndrome, which could provoke fantasies of child abuse -- Allen's had long since become total detachment. That...
...Allen was born into Bronx serfdom, the son of Martin and Nettie Konigsberg, still happily married after 62 years. His psychograph is to be found mainly in the emotional autobiography he has transformed into comedy routines and then movie art. As Ice-T can attest, it is treacherous to mistake the singer for the song. And it is presumptuous for the public to believe it "knows" Woody $ Allen. And yet Allen's work presents itself as so nakedly, ostentatiously about himself that it seems fair to subject it to a critic's equivalent of the psychoanalysis he has undergone...
...struggle, his films say, of man with himself. Women are the objects, the prizes, the threat. Perhaps this is why he has often portrayed them as voracious or vapid, why a hint of misogyny courses through his oeuvre. Allen's first wife brought a $1 million suit charging Allen with "holding her up to scorn and ridicule" after finding herself, as French critic Robert Benayoun writes in a sympathetic biography of Allen, "the source of numerous stories ((that)) turned her private life into a national joke." Keaton and Farrow, his two longtime romantic companions and frequent co-stars, often played...
These days, as notorious gentlemen from Rob Lowe to Clarence Thomas have proved, every scandal is a career move. Indiscretions that movie stars once paid to suppress they now discuss on Oprah and Arsenio; those modern-day analysts' couches have become celebrities' thrones. Allen the filmmaker can use this publicity; his recent movies have been flops. (An industry axiom: everybody knows Woody Allen, but nobody goes to his movies.) It is even likely that the brouhaha will boost Husbands and Wives at the box office, at least until people decide whether they like it or not. For Farrow the actress...