Word: allenated
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Perhaps only in Cannes would hundreds of people crush into lines, beg for tickets, offer to rent various body parts, for the chance to see the new Woody Allen film. The 72-year-old writer-director is long past his renown as America's wryest, most prolific auteur, let alone the King of Anarchy title he achieved with his early, funny movies; that Allen keeps making films is deemed by most of his compatriots an act of will, almost defiance, by a man whose genius evaporated some time in the late...
...loyal admirers in Europe, though, as was proved by the urgent mob waiting to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and by the warm applause when it ended. After the screening we ran into one of his champions: Michel Ciment, the doyen of French critics. "You still go to Woody Allen films?" asked Michel in mock or mocking surprise. He was just setting us up for a pronouncement: that whatever Allen's current reputation, years from now people will take a retrospective look at the 40 - some films he's made and proclaim him as part of a holy trinity of movie...
...Well, maybe not in that empyrean, but arguably in the ballpark. It's hard not to feel warmly toward Allen after VCB, his first vital movie since Match Point three years ago (we quickly throw the veil of oblivion over Scoop and Cassandra's Dream), and maybe his most engaging large-scale effort since, let's say, Crimes and Misdemeanors nearly 20 years ago. It doesn't percolate with the inventive comic situations or quotable one-liners of the films that established his meta-movie credentials, Annie Hall and Manhattan; but, like them, this one is about people whose jobs...
...this is going to turn into a panel discussion.") But a bout of stomach poisoning breaks Cristina's mood, and she must convalesce the rest of the weekend. That leaves Juan Antonio with the disapproving, and spoken-for, Vicky. She is one of those females, rife in the Allen canon, whose insecurity is expressed as hostility to men; she castrates, or at least circumcises, them with every cutting word. And Hall, with her flawless American accent, is equally persuasive at inhabiting, not just miming, the stammering tenseness of the traditional Allen heroine...
...sign for justice that last week, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, Kentucky death row inmate Marco Allen Chapman announced again that he wants to his lawyers to stop fighting for his life. "I guess it's kind of my Christian upbringing," he told an AP reporter. "Suicide is unforgivable. I figure if I'm not doing it to myself, it's not a suicide." The Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammed also raised his hand briefly, asking in a letter for the state to go ahead and "murder this innocent black man." (He later reversed course and said...